The Long Descent (7 page)

The last few decades have already seen substantial decline in the real standard of living for most Americans and many people elsewhere in the industrialized world. We will likely see quite a bit more in the next few years, especially if the economic juggling act that props up trillions of dollars of paper debt in America and elsewhere gives way. Declining standards of living equate to declining public health. Declining public health impacts population levels. As people become poorer, they become sicker; childhood mortality goes up — the United States is already approaching parity with the nonindustrial world in that department
²⁴
— and other vulnerable groups suffer as well.

There will be crises and disasters in economic, political, social, and military spheres. At certain points along the curve of disintegration, systems become unstable and sudden breakdowns happen. These are the things people will remember afterwards: the day the electric power grid finally went down for good, the winter that the big epidemic took a third of the people in their town, the year that civil war broke out down south, and the decade in which the last shreds of national government dissolved. Ordinary disasters such as hurricanes and massive floods will take on a new role as the resources to rebuild will be less and less available. The lessons of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are likely to be repeated many times over in the years to come. These sudden events will punctuate the decline, not cause it, and attempts to respond to them without dealing with the broader issues will simply transfer stresses to other aspects of a society in decline.

Sooner or later in the process, we'll see the breakdown of existing social, political, and economic forms and the rise of transitional structures. At some point, continental governments such as the United States and Canada will come apart, in fact if not in name, to be replaced by regional and local governments cobbled together on an ad hoc basis; the global corporate economy will be replaced by jerry-built local exchange systems, and so on. The more sustainable, stable, and effective these transitional structures are, the more people, technology, knowledge, and culture will make it through the couple of centuries that this whole process will take.

That last is the detail that has to be remembered. Nobody now alive will see the end of the process that's now under way. The challenge we face in the short term is how to weather the next round of crises when it arrives. In the long term, the challenge is to get through the Long Descent with as much useful information and resources as possible, and to transmit them to the successor cultures that, to judge by past models, will begin coalescing sometime in the 23rd and 24th centuries. That means making sure that people right now have the information and connections they need to adapt constructively to the changes brought by the decline of our civilization, rather than backing themselves into one blind alley or another. It also means taking a hard look at some of the most fundamental ways people in today's industrial societies think about the world.

TWO
The Stories
We Tell
Ourselves

B
y this point even those of my readers who haven't yet thrown this book at the nearest wall will likely be appalled by the image of the future presented in the last few pages. What I find most interesting about this very common reaction is that it can have its roots in two completely different, and in fact opposite, sets of assumptions and beliefs about the future. On the one hand, many people insist that no matter what problems crop up before us, modern science, technology, and raw human ingenuity will inevitably win out and make the world of the future better than the world of today. On the other hand, some people insist that no matter what we do, some overwhelming catastrophe will soon bring civilization suddenly crashing down into mass death and a Road Warrior future.

Discussions about peak oil and the predicament of industrial society constantly revolve around these two alternatives, as though they were the only possibilities. Many believers in either option don't seem to be able to wrap their minds around the possibility of a third alternative. It's a remarkable situation. If two meteorologists on a weather program were to get into a debate about the weather to be expected on a fall day, and one insisted the only possibility was clear skies and temperatures in the 90s, while the other claimed a sudden blizzard was about to happen, most viewers would probably suspect that something was out of kilter. Too many of today's discussions about the future of industrial society impose an equally strange distortion on the likely shape of the world our children and grandchildren will face.

Blind spots of this sort show the hidden presence of myth. Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Human beings think with stories as inevitably as they see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most important of those stories — the ones that define the nature of the world for those who tell them — are myths.

Most ancient cultures took their myths directly from their religious ideas, using traditional stories about the gods and goddesses to make sense of their world. Our society does the same thing in a hole-and-corner way, dressing up an assortment of old religious ideas in the more fashionable garments of scientific theory or political ideology. Still, scratch the most up-to-date modern world-view or the most casually held popular opinion, and anyone with a nodding acquaintance with traditional myths will recognize the underlying story at a glance.

Progress and Apocalypse

The two competing visions of the future just mentioned are no exception. You don't need to know anything about traditional mythology to recognize them. Unless you've been sleeping in a cave for the last three hundred years, you know them inside and out.

The first is the
myth of progress.
According to this story, all of human history is a grand tale of human improvement. From the primitive ignorance and savagery of our cave-dwelling ancestors, according to this myth, people climbed step by step up the ladder of progress, following in the wake of the evolutionary drive that raised us up from primeval slime and brought us to the threshold of human intelligence. Ever since our ancestors first became fully human, knowledge gathered over the generations made it possible for each culture to go further, become wiser, and accomplish more than the ones that came before it. With the coming of the Scientific Revolution three hundred years ago, the slow triumph of reason over nature shifted into overdrive and has been accelerating ever since. Eventually, once the last vestiges of primitive superstition and ignorance are cast aside, our species will leap upward from the surface of its home planet and embrace its destiny among the stars.

The second myth is the
myth of apocalypse.
According to this story, all of human history is a tragic blind alley. At one time people lived in harmony with their world, each other, and themselves, but that golden age ended with a disastrous wrong turn and things have gone downhill ever since. The rise of vast, unnatural cities, governed by bloated governmental bureaucracies and inhabited by people who have abandoned spiritual values for a wholly material existence, marks the point of no return. Sometime soon the whole rickety structure will come crashing down, overwhelmed by sudden catastrophe, and billions of people will die as civilization comes apart and rampaging hordes scour the landscape. Only those who abandon a corrupt and doomed society and return to the old, true ways of living will survive to build a better world.

Both these myths have deep roots in the collective imagination of the modern world, and very few people nowadays seem to be able to think about the future at all without following one narrative or the other. It would be hard to find any two narratives less appropriate, though, for the future we are actually likely to encounter. Both of them rely on assumptions about the world that don't stand up to any sort of critical examination.

The faith in progress, for example, rests on the unstated assumption that limits don't apply to us because the forward momentum of human progress automatically trumps everything else. If we want limitless supplies of energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the world will give it to us. Of course the world
did
give it to us — in the form of unimaginably huge deposits of fossil fuels storing hundreds of millions of years' worth of photosynthesis — and we wasted it in a few centuries of fantastic extravagance. The lifestyles we've grown up treating as normal are entirely the products of that extravagance. This puts us in the position of a lottery winner who's spent millions of dollars in a few short years and is running out of money. The odds of hitting another million-dollar–jackpot are minute, and no amount of wishful thinking will enable us to keep up our current lifestyle by getting a job at the local hamburger stand.

Nor is the past quite so much of a linear story of progress as the folklore of the industrial age would have it. Look back over the millennia that came before the start of the industrial age, straight back to the emergence of agriculture, and one of the most striking things you'll notice is how little human life changed over that time. The lives of peasants, priests, soldiers, and aristocrats in Sumer in 3000 bce, say, differed only in relatively minor details from those of their equivalents in the Chou dynasty in China 15 centuries later, Roman North Africa 15 centuries after that, or medieval Spain another 15 centuries closer to our time. Tools gradually changed from stone to bronze to iron, and their shapes evolved with changes in technique, but the requirements of the agricultural cycle and the limited energy available from wind, water, biomass, and muscle imposed a common framework on human societies.

While plenty of new technologies emerged over the millennia, the process of technological change was not a one-way street; many technologies invented in periods of high innovation in the past were lost in later periods of regression. To this day, for example, nobody knows how the Egyptians cut, moved, and fitted the immense stone blocks of the Pyramids.
¹
In the same way, the ingenious clockwork technology used in the Antikythera device — an ancient Greek machine for tracking planetary movements — was lost by the time Rome fell and had to be reinvented from scratch in the Renaissance.
²
Before the harnessing of fossil fuels, technological advances were vulnerable to loss because they had only the most limited place in everyday life; without cheap, abundant energy to power them, it was more efficient and economical for pre-modern societies to rely on human labor with hand tools for nearly all their economic activities.

This stable pattern changed only when the first steam engines allowed people to begin tapping the fantastic amounts of energy hidden away within the Earth. The torrent of nearly free energy that followed those first discoveries played the crucial role in bringing the industrial world into being. For thousands of years before that time, everything else necessary for an industrial society had been part of the cultural heritage of most civilizations. Renewable energy sources? Wind power, water power, biomass, and muscle power were all used extensively in the preindustrial past without launching an industrial society. Scientific knowledge? The laws of mechanics were worked out in ancient times, and a Greek scientist even invented the steam turbine two centuries before the birth of Christ; without fossil fuels it was a useless curiosity.
³
Human resourcefulness and ingenuity? It's as arrogant as it is silly to insist that people in past ages weren't as resourceful and ingenious as we are.

Fossil fuel energy —
and only fossil fuel energy
— made it possible to break with the old agrarian pattern and construct the industrial world. Unless some new and equally abundant energy source comes on line fast enough to make up for fossil fuel depletion, we will find ourselves back in the same world our ancestors knew, with the additional burdens of a huge surplus population and an impoverished planetary biosphere to contend with. Combine these constraints with the plain, hard reality of vanishing fossil fuels, and the myth of perpetual progress becomes a mirage.

Believers in apocalypse, for their part, insist that the end of industrial civilization will be sudden, catastrophic, and total. That claim is just as hard to square with the realities of our predicament as the argument for perpetual progress. Every previous civilization that has fallen has taken centuries to collapse, and there's no reason to think the present case will be any different. The resource base of industrial society is shrinking but it's far from exhausted. The impact of global warming and other ecological disruptions build slowly over time, and governments and ordinary citizens alike have every reason to hold things together as long as possible.

The history of the last century — think of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the brutal excesses of Communism and Nazism, just for starters — shows that industrial societies can endure tremendous disruption without dissolving into a Hobbesian war of all against all. People in hard times are far more likely to follow orders and hope for the best than to turn into the rampaging, mindless mobs that play so large a role in survivalist fantasies these days. The sorry history of the Y2K noncrisis a few years ago — a subject we'll be discussing in more detail in the next chapter — offers a useful reminder that claims of catastrophe can be overstated.

But fantasy is often more appealing than reality, and most of the apocalyptic notions in circulation these days draw very heavily on popular fantasies. The idea (common just now among some Christians) that all good Christians will be raptured away to heaven just as the rest of the world goes to hell in a handbasket is a case in point. It's a lightly disguised fantasy of mass suicide — when you tell the kids that Grandma went to heaven to be with Jesus, most people understand what that means — and it also serves as a way for people to pretend to themselves that God will rescue them from the consequences of their own actions. That's one of history's all time bad bets, but it's certainly been a popular one.