The Long Descent (9 page)

There's some complicated cultural history behind the split between progressive and apocalyptic myth. A little over four centuries ago, at the time of the Reformation, mainstream Christianity effectively capitulated to rational-materialist philosophy and redefined the deeply mythic narratives of the Bible as secular history. Before then, most theologians discussed what the events described in Book of Revelations meant as mystical symbols and analogies; afterward, most of them argued instead about when and how the same events would happen as historical events in the everyday world. Out of the resulting debates came two main schools of thought.
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The first, the premillennialist position, held that Jesus would return and bring about the Millennium, a thousand-year period of bliss when Christians would rule the world. The other party, the postmillennialists, argued instead that Christians would rule the world for a thousand years of bliss, and after that, Jesus would return.

The difference may seem about as relevant as the number of angels that can dance on the head of the late Jerry Falwell, but each viewpoint has sweeping implications. If the postmillennial-ists are right, history is on their side, since they're destined to rule the world for a thousand years before Jesus gets here. Thus post-millennialists tend to believe that things are on the right track and will get better over time until the Millennium arrives. If the pre-millennialists are right, on the other hand, history is on Satan's side, since it will take nothing less than the personal intervention of Jesus himself to give the Christians their thousand years of world rule. Accordingly, premillennialists tend to believe that things are on the wrong track and will get worse over time until, when everything is as bad as it can get, Jesus shows up, beats the stuffing out of the devil and his minions, and brings on the Millennium.

Drop the theological fine print from these two viewpoints and you've got the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse in their contemporary forms. Believers in progress argue that industrial civilization is better than any other in history and destined to get better still, so long as we just put enough money into scientific research, or get government out of the way of industry, or whatever else they believe will keep history on its course. Believers in apocalypse argue that industrial civilization is worse than any other in history, and its present difficulties will end in an overnight catastrophe that will destroy it and usher in whatever better world their mythology promises them — a better world in which they will inevitably have the privileged place denied them in this one.

Both these mythic narratives, in other words, are myths of Utopia. Both promise that the future will bring a much better world than the present; their only disagreements are about how to get there and how closely the Utopia to come resembles the society we've got now. Thus it's not surprising that believers in progress tend to be those who feel they benefit from the current social order, and believers in apocalypse tend to be those who feel margin-alized by the current social order and excluded from its benefits. Either way, the lure of Utopia is a potent force, one that has deep roots in our culture and our collective psyche.

It's also one of the primary obstacles that stand in the way of a constructive response to the crisis of industrial society. The lesson of the limits to growth — a lesson most people have been doing their best to avoid learning, with increasing desperation, since the early 1970s — is that the age of cheap, abundant energy is passing, and nothing we or anyone else can do will keep it here or bring it back. We can't count on the future to bring us a better world, via progress, apocalyptic collapse, or any combination of the two. Rather, we can count on it to bring us a world of hard ecological limits, restricted opportunities, and lowered expectations, in which many of our fondest dreams will have to be set aside for the foreseeable future — or forever. It's a world where hopes can still be realized, dreams can still be pursued, and the experience of being human can still be contemplated and celebrated, but all these things will have to be on a much more modest scale than the experience of the recent past or the utopian dreams that either the progressive or the apocalyptic myth have prepared us to consider.

During the three centuries of industrial expansion, utopian thinking was adaptive, to use ecologists' jargon: it encouraged people to think big at a time when the soaring availability of fossil fuel energy made explosive growth pay off. As the industrial age peaks and begins to decline, the equation is reversing. In a world where energy and all other nonrenewable resources are likely to get progressively more scarce and expensive, it's time to learn again how to think small — and that process will be much easier if we say farewell to Utopia and focus on the things we can actually achieve in the stark limits of time and resources we still have left.

Knowing Only One Story

One of the things that makes our culture's reliance on the utopian myths of progress and apocalypse so problematic as we approach the end of the age of cheap energy is that both narratives claim to explain the entire universe. Universal claims of this sort have become popular in recent centuries, but from a wider historical perspective, stories that claim to be the answer to everything are something of a novelty. Traditional cultures around the world, in fact, have a very large number of stories, and much of the education received by young people in those cultures consists of sharing, learning, and thinking about those stories.

The stories handed down in oral cultures aren't simply entertainment, any more than are the stories we tell ourselves about the universe today. Stories are probably the oldest and most important of all human tools. Human beings think with stories, fitting what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the universe around us into narrative patterns that make the world make sense. We use stories to tell us who we are, what the world is like, and what we can and can't do with our lives. Every culture has its stories, and if you pay careful attention to the stories a culture tells, you can grasp things about the culture that nothing else will teach you.

One of the most striking things about old stories — stories of traditional cultures — is that no two of them have the same moral. If you were born in an English-speaking culture, for example, you likely grew up with the last remnant of England's old stories in the form of fairy tales that put different people in different situations, with very different results. Sometimes violating a prohibition brought success (think “Jack and the Beanstalk”), but sometimes it brought disaster (“Sleeping Beauty”). Sometimes victory went to the humble and patient (“Cinderella”), but sometimes it went to the one who had the chutzpah to dare the impossible (“Puss in Boots”). Common themes run through the old stories, of course, but they never take the same shape twice. Those differences are a source of great power. If you have a wealth of different stories to think with, odds are that whatever the world throws at you, you'll be able to find a narrative pattern that makes sense of it.

Over the last few centuries, though, the multiple-narrative approach of traditional cultures has given way, especially in the industrial West, to a way of thinking that privileges a single story above all others. Think of any currently popular political or religious ideology, and you'll likely find at its center the claim that one and only one story explains everything in the world. For fundamentalist Christians, it's the story of Fall and Redemption ending with the Second Coming of Christ. For Marxists, it's the story of dialectical materialism ending with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For believers in any of the flotilla of apocalyptic ideologies cruising the waterways of the modern imagination, it's another version of the same story, with different falls from grace ending in redemption through different catastrophes. For rationalists, neo-conservatives, most scientists, and many other people in the developed world, the one true story is the story of progress. The political left and right each has its own story; and the list goes on. From the perspective of traditional cultures, believers in these ideologies are woefully undereducated, since for all practical purposes, they know only one story.

This modern habit of knowing only one story has certain predictable results. One of these is that the story itself becomes invisible to those who believe in it. From their perspective, their story isn't a story, it's simply the way things are, and the fact that it copies other versions of the same story is irrelevant, since their story is true and the others aren't. Often the story becomes so much a part of everyday thinking that it vanishes from sight entirely, becoming a presupposition that may never be stated or even noticed by those who build their lives around it. The myth of progress, a sterling example, has become so pervasive nowadays that few people notice how completely it dominates current thinking about the future. Speaking about historians of his own time who embraced the mythology of progress, the great 20th century historian Arnold –Toynbee wrote:

The difference between these post-Christian Western historians and their Christian predecessors is that the moderns do not allow themselves to be aware of the pattern in their minds, whereas Bossuet, Eusebius, and Saint Augustine were fully conscious of it. If one cannot think without mental patterns — and, in my belief, one cannot — it is better to know what they are; for a pattern of which one is unconscious is a pattern that holds one at its mercy.
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While the story itself may become invisible, its implications are anything but, and this leads to the second symptom of knowing only one story: the certainty that whatever problem comes up, it has one and only one solution. For fundamentalist Christians, no matter what the problem, the solution is surrendering your will to Jesus (or, more to the point, to the guy who claims to be able to tell you who Jesus wants you to vote for). For Marxists, the one solution for all problems is proletarian revolution. For neoconserva-tives, it's the free market. For scientists, it's more scientific research and education. For Democrats, it's electing Democrats; for Republicans, it's electing Republicans, and so on.

What makes this fixation on a single solution so problematic is that the universe is what ecologists call a complex system. In a complex system, feedback loops with unexpected consequences make a mockery of simplistic attempts to predict effects from causes. No one solution will effectively respond to more than a small portion of the challenges the system can throw at you. This leads to the third symptom of knowing only one story: repeated failure.

Recent economic history offers a good example. For the last two decades, free-market advocates in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been pushing a particular set of economic policies on governments and economies around the world, insisting that these are the one and only solution to every economic ill. Everywhere those policies have been fully implemented, the result has been economic and social disaster — think East Asia in the late 1980s, or Russia and Latin America in the 1990s — and every one of the countries devastated by the results has returned to prosperity only after junking the policies in question.
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None of this has stopped the free market's true believers from continuing to press forward toward the imaginary Utopia their story promises them.

For those who know plenty of stories, and know how to think with them, the complexity of the universe is easier to deal with, because they have a much better chance of being able to recognize what story the universe seems to be following, and act accordingly.

Those who don't know any stories at all — if such improbable beings actually exist — may still get by; even though they don't have the resources of story-wisdom to draw on, they may still be able to judge the situation on its own merits and act accordingly, because a lack of stories at least offers some hope of flexibility. Those who only know one story, though, and are committed to the idea that the world makes sense if and only if it's interpreted through the filter of that one story, are stuck in a rigid stance with no options for change. Much more often than not, they fail, since the complexity of the universe is such that no single story makes a useful tool for understanding more than a very small part of it.

If they can recognize this and let go of their story, they can begin to learn. If you've gotten your ego wrapped up in the idea that you know the one and only true story, on the other hand, and you try to force the world to fit your story rather than allowing your story to change to fit the world, the results will not be good.

This leads to the fourth symptom of knowing only one story: rage. The third symptom, failure, can be a gift because it offers the opportunity for learning, but if the gift is too emotionally difficult to accept, the easy way out is to take refuge in anger. When we get angry with people who disagree with us about politics or religion, I'm coming to think, very often what really angers us is the fact that our preferred story doesn't fit the universe everywhere and always, and those who disagree with us simply remind us of that uncomfortable fact.

Plenty of pundits, and many others as well, have commented on the extraordinary level of anger that surges through America these days. From talk radio to political debates to everyday conversations, dialogue has given way to diatribe across the political spectrum. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that this has happened over a quarter century when the grand narratives of both major American political parties failed the test of reality. The 1960s and 1970s saw the Democrats get the chance to enact the reforms they wanted; the 1980s and the first decade of the 21st century saw the Republicans get the same opportunity. Both parties found themselves stymied by a universe that obstinately refused to play along with their stories, and both sides turned to anger and scapegoating as a way to avoid having to rethink their ideas.