One 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.
Again, this is mystification, and it serves a socially necessary purpose in a culture where talking about the goals and values of specific technologies is taboo. The frequently repeated claim that “technology is value-free” is fatuous nonsense, but as long as we think about tools and techniques as a single thing called “technology,” it’s also plausible nonsense. In reality, of course, individual technologies embody the values and goals of their designers, and they are selected by users on the basis of the technology’s relationship to values and goals. Look at the suite of technologies used by a person or a culture, and it’s an easy matter to divine the values that person or that culture holds and the goals they pursue. This is unmentionable in our culture because, among other reasons, the values and goals our technologies reveal to the world are a very long distance indeed from the ones we claim to embrace.
Thus it’s crucial that any meaningful discussion about the future finds its way out of debates about technology in the abstract and addresses at least two other, more specific questions:
• First, which technologies, out of the many available options, will still be useful as we wake up from the dream of perpetual progress and start down the far side of Hubbert’s peak?
• Second, what are the values and goals that might usefully gov-ern our technologies — and the rest of our society — as the deindustrial age dawns around us?
The first of these questions was central to Chapter 5 of this book; the second forms the core of the present chapter. The latter issue can’t be settled, or even meaningfully discussed, without asking hard questions about some of the most basic assumptions of the modern world. It’s one thing to talk about which technology to use for a given project, but it’s quite another to ask whether the project itself is worth doing and, if so, whether applying some form of technology is the best way to go about it at all. Questions like these may start out in the most pragmatic terms, but they lead inescapably into the dimension of human thought that our society is least comfortable discussing: the dimension of spirituality.
After the Prosthetic Society
It’s often said that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one, and the same thing deserves to be said at least as much of societies in general. In every age, most people believe that the current state of affairs can be counted on to keep on going forever, and they plan for the future on the assumption that it will be just like the present, only more so. Political, economic, and cultural institutions do the same thing, and too often spiritual traditions — which have the social function of pointing out inconvenient realities — get caught up in the same way of thinking. Then the future comes along and turns out different, and everyone who thought they knew what was coming ends up sitting in the wreckage wondering what happened.
Prophecies about the future made on the basis of conventional wisdom just don’t wear very well. When I was growing up in the suburban America of the 1960s, everyone knew that by 2000 we’d have manned bases on the Moon and a Hilton hotel in orbit. Back here on the ground, our homes would be run by nuclear power that would literally be too cheap to meter; you’d just pay a monthly hookup fee and use all the juice you wanted. The decaying inner cities would be replaced by huge, terraced megastructures or Paolo Soleri’s gargantuan arcologies, while Sealab (does anybody remember Sealab any more?) was going to be the prototype for whole cities under the sea. It would have been quite a world, but somehow it got lost in the 1970s energy crises, and we ended up instead with SUVs, metastasizing suburban sprawl, and the short-term political gimmicks that papered over fossil fuel depletion for twenty years and lost us our best bet of getting through the next century without some form of collapse.
So it may not be out of line to suggest that many current ideas about where we’re headed are as misplaced as the atomic Utopia of 1960s futurists turned out to be. One trend usually pointed out as the wave of the future seems particularly likely to end up in history’s compost heap in much the same way: the replacement of human abilities with electronic and mechanical devices.
This mechanization of everyday life has become a huge trend, especially, but not only among the middle classes of the industrial world, who set fashions for the rest of the planet. Think of something that people used to do, and the salesman at your local mall can probably sell you something to do it for you. My favorite example is the breadmaking machine. A hundred years ago nearly every family baked its own bread; it’s a simple, enjoyable task that can be done with Stone Age technology. Now, though, you can drop hundreds of dollars on a countertop machine with buttons and flashing lights that will do it for you.
Similarly, people used to entertain themselves by singing and playing musical instruments, but now we have CDs and –iPods. They used to exercise by taking walks in the park, but now we have treadmill machines. In place of memories, we have Palm Pilots; in place of imagination, we have TVs, and so on. At the zenith of the mechanizing trend came that bizarre figure of the late 20th century, the suburban couch potato, whose sole activity outside of work hours and commuting was sitting on a couch clicking a baroque array of remote controls while delivery drivers came to the door with an endless supply of consumer products ordered, bought, and paid for online.
In effect, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the creation of a prosthetic culture. A prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a human function. They are, of course, valuable technologies for those who have lost the use of the function in question; if you’ve lost a leg via accident or illness, for example, an artificial leg that lets you walk again is a very good thing to have. Still, when a society starts convincing people to saw off their own legs so businesses can sell them artificial ones, something has gone decidedly wrong — and that’s not too far from the situation we’re in today.
There are at least two drastic problems with our prosthetic culture. First, the abandonment of human abilities in favor of mechanical replacements has no little impact on who we are and what we can be. As E. M. Forster pointed out in his harrowing 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” it’s hard to imagine that anyone’s highest potential as a human being can be achieved in a lifestyle that consists solely of sitting in a chair and pushing buttons. On the other hand, Forsteresque remote-control dystopias are about as likely now as those orbital hotels and undersea cities because the basis for the couch potato lifestyle is trickling away as I write these words.
The driving force behind the prosthetic culture of the 20th century’s last decades was the final hurrah of the age of cheap oil. The manipulations that crashed the price of petroleum in the early 1980s made energy cheaper than it has ever been in human history. At several points in the 1980s and 1990s, oil dropped to $10 a barrel, its lowest price ever, once inflation is factored in. During those years, oil was the single largest component in the industrial world’s energy mix, and the “gateway resource” that gave access to all other forms of energy: the machines that mine coal, drill for natural gas, build hydroelectric dams, and so on, are all powered by oil. The plunging price of oil thus pulled the bottom out from under the cost of energy as a whole, and it put the world’s industrial societies into a historically unprecedented situation. For the first (and probably only) time in history, it was cheaper to build a machine to do almost everything than to have a human being do it.
In some ways, of course, this was simply the culmination of a process that got started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and then went into overdrive with the birth of the petroleum economy in the years just before the First World War. Earlier efforts to replace human skills with machines had to deal with much more limited and expensive energy supplies, which forced a reliance on economies of scale; machine-made bread, for instance, had to be made in big factories (rather than home breadmaking machines) to keep costs within reach of most consumers. The pinnacle of the age of cheap oil made energy so abundant and so inexpensive, at least in the more privileged industrial countries, that it was briefly possible to ignore economies of scale and make each middle-class person the beneficiary of a microfactory designed to produce, or at least deliver, whatever goods and services were wanted.
All this, though, depended on cheap energy, and with today’s plateauing of world oil production and the approach of inevitable declines in the near future, the prosthetic culture of the last few decades is headed for the recycling bin of history. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the romanticism of which people who question today’s technological triumphalism are so often accused. Rather, they’re a matter of cold, hard economics.
The modern faith in progress has its blind spots, and one of the most pervasive is the tendency for people to believe that the present arrangement of society is somehow inevitable and the natural result of all those centuries of progress. To this way of thinking, for example, it seems inevitable that every culture will end up relying on machines rather than people for tasks like data processing, simply because that’s the way we do things. Behind the grand facade of progress, though, lies a simple economic fact: in an age of abundant fossil fuel energy, it’s cheaper — a lot cheaper — to build and power a machine to do something than it is to train and employ a human being to do the same thing. As long as that equation holds, the only constraint that limits how many people get replaced by machines is the sophistication of the machines, and so the same equation drives technological advances. Because machines powered by cheap fossil fuels do things at lower costs than people do, investment in new technology tends to pay for itself. The last three centuries of the Western world’s history show what happens when this process goes into high gear.
The whole process depends, though, on having a cheap, abundant source of mechanical and electrical energy. For the last three centuries, fossil fuels have provided that, but the lesson of peak oil is that this was a temporary situation, possible only because human beings found and exploited the huge but finite reserves of cheap energy in the Earth’s crust. Everything based on that fact is subject to change — including the equation that makes machine labor cheaper than human labor.
In a world where fossil fuels are expensive and scarce, the equation works the other way. Modern machines require very specialized and resource-intensive inputs of energy and materials, and if those aren’t available within tight specifications, the machines don’t work. Human beings, by contrast, can be kept happy and productive with very simple, generally available resources — food, drink, warmth, shelter, companionship, and mental stimulation, all of which have wide tolerances and a great deal of room for substitution. In a society that has to operate within the energy budget provided by renewable resources, ordinary human needs are a good deal less challenging to provide than the pure, concentrated, and precisely controlled inputs needed by complex machines.
This disparity explains why the steam turbine, invented in ancient Greek times by Hero of Alexandria, remained a philosopher’s toy, and why the brilliant mechanical inventions of medieval China never caused the sort of social and economic transformations the Industrial Revolution launched in the modern West. Machines existed, but without the energy resources to power them — more exactly, without the realization that coal, oil, and natural gas can be turned into mechanical energy if you have the right kind of machine — human labor was more economical, and so the machines languished. In the deindustrial world of the future, when human labor will again be less expensive than mechanical energy, counting on machines to maintain some semblance of today’s prosthetic society may turn out to be an expensive mistake; focusing on human potential may be a better option.
All this suggests that current visions of the future, and the policies based on them, are in desperate need of a rethink. The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them. How many things? That depends on how much renewable energy capacity gets brought online before production rates of oil and natural gas start slipping down the steep slopes of Hubbert’s peak.
In a worst-cast scenario in which nothing significant is done until major crises start to hit (and in the United States especially, we’re uncomfortably close to that scenario right now), energy shortages could be severe enough that during the worst phases of crisis, essentially everything will have to be done with human labor alone. In any realistic future, however, old skills are likely to be in high demand again. Professions that involve doing useful things with one’s hands, brain, and a relatively simple muscle-powered toolkit should be high on any list of hot career tracks in the 21st century.
The Butlerian Future
One of the ironies of this situation is that science fiction, the branch of modern literature most often caught up in the uncritical celebration of progress, has more than once worked through the consequences of the equation just discussed. Now it’s true that science fiction has a very mixed track record for predicting the future, and quite a few of the major trends of the last half century were missed entirely by science fiction’s would-be prophets. Manned landings on the moon were a staple of science fiction from Jules Verne until Apollo 11, yet nobody in the SF scene even guessed at the immense cultural impact that television coverage of that first lunar landing would turn out to have. The thought that the Apollo flights would turn out to be, not the beginning of a golden age of space exploration, but an extravagant gesture too costly to push further out into the solar system, would have been rejected out of hand in science fiction’s own golden age between the two World Wars.
Still, it’s when science fiction isn’t actually trying to anticipate our immediate future that its predictions often prove the most prescient. Though it anticipated all too much of today’s online culture, the E. M. Forster story mentioned earlier in this chapter wasn’t an attempt to foresee the Internet; Forster described his imagined future as “a counter-blast to one of the early heavens of H. G. Wells,”1 and he used it mostly to talk about the downside of his own culture’s obsession with ideas as a substitute for lived experience. In the same way, a science fiction novel widely considered to be one of the greatest works in the genre — Frank Herbert’s sprawling classic Dune — doesn’t claim to talk about the near future of our own society, but several of its central themes are likely to make the transition from speculative fiction to hard reality in the decades ahead of us.
An important element of the backstory in Dune was the –Butlerian Jihad, a massive and violent popular movement against computer technology that took place centuries before the events in Herbert’s novel. “Once,” one character in the book explains to another, “men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”2 In the aftermath of the Butlerian Jihad, the human race went down a different path. As the same character comments a bit later in the same conversation: “The Great Revolt took away a crutch…It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human functions.”
By the time Dune opens, human beings fill many of the roles now entrusted to machines. Mentats, people trained in mnemonic and analytic skills who function as living computers, handle data processing; struggles between major power blocs employ assassins and highly trained special forces rather than massed military technologies; secret societies such as the Bene Gesserit sisterhood pursue disciplines of mind-body mastery that give them astonishing powers over themselves and other people as well.
Under present circumstances, mind you, a Butlerian Jihad is about as likely as a resumption of the Punic Wars. Even radical neoprimitivists who think we all ought to go back to hunting and gathering rely on websites and podcasts to get their message out. Still, Herbert may turn out to be a prophet after all; there’s a real chance that we may find ourselves backing into a Butlerian future without intending anything of the kind. The same economic forces that will make human labor more viable than mechanical prosthetics will open a door through which some of the possibilities Herbert suggested might be accessible.
It’s not often noticed that the sort of exotic labor performed by Herbert’s characters is well within the range of human capacity. The skills of Dune’s Mentats, for example, have a close equivalent in the art of memory, a system of mnemonics first devised in ancient Greece and passed on via classical Roman schools of rhetoric to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.3 Students of the art learned to encode material to be memorized in the form of visual images and to file them in mental matrices of various kinds that allowed instant recall.
Adepts of the art accomplished feats of memorization that stagger the modern imagination. Peter of Ravenna, a renowned exponent of the art in the 14th century, and the author of one of the most widely read memory treatises of the age, was famous in his time for having the entire body of medieval canon law, word for word, at his mental fingertips.4 Could similar mental disciplines replace at least some of the functions of today’s computer technology once catabolic collapse puts modern data processing out of reach? This is likely to be a more viable option than trying to maintain our current technologies as the resources needed to build and power them slip away from beneath our feet.
In the process of creating a prosthetic society over the last three hundred years, we have vastly expanded our technological capacities at the cost of systematically neglecting the potentials within our own bodies and minds. The body-mind disciplines worked out in other cultures over the centuries, or practiced in subcultures within the industrial world itself, could become important resources for the deindustrial age. If we have the imagination to let go of the monkey trap that fastens us to a purely technological approach to life, we can see these traditions as resources rather than irrelevancies.
The ideologies of the industrial age either devalued human potential in favor of the possibilities opened up by fossil-fuel-powered– machines, or they reacted against this sort of thinking by glorifying whatever human beings could do that the machines of any given time couldn’t do. The 19th century clash between industrial triumphalism and its Romantic opposition still defines most of the terms in which we think of machines, human beings, and their interactions today. Herbert’s imagination leapt beyond this clash to offer a glimpse of what we might be capable of if we pursued human potential with as much enthusiasm as today’s engineers push the limits of machines. In a world where energy-intensive–high technologies may not be supportable for much longer, Herbert’s glimpse into a possible future is worth thinking about.
Herbert’s novel also places spirituality at the center of this vision of expanded human possibilities, and this is only fair. The skilled professions that will have to be revived in the deindustrial age treat human potential as means, but spirituality treats the fulfillment of human potential as an end in itself, the proper goal of human life. As the prosthetic society fades into memory, ways of life that focus our attention on goals we can reach without trashing the planet are likely to prove more useful than those modern belief systems that treat the accumulation of consumer gewgaws as the ultimate goal of human existence. The world’s spiritual traditions offer a rich selection of such lifeways, and as the deindus-trial age dawns around us, they may prove to be the most relevant force of all.
Magic and the Enlightenment
The idea that spirituality might have anything useful to impart to the future can, of course, be counted on to offend a sizeable segment of today’s population. Our culture insists that modern scientific methods of solving problems rendered all other methods obsolete, and it upholds this claim with the same conviction that ran through the religious dogmas of past ages. Yet this declaration of faith begs questions on a far deeper level because scientific methods are only really well suited to certain kinds of questions relating to the ways matter and energy interact — and these questions aren’t as relevant to the current predicament of industrial society as they sometimes seem.
Peak oil is a case in point. What happens to today’s industrial economy when world petroleum production peaks and begins its long decline will likely have very little to do with how matter and energy interact. The forces that will take the lead in the opening phases of the deindustrial age will be political, cultural, and psychological, not scientific. About these issues the methods of the scientist and the engineer have very little useful to say, and most of what they do have to say was drowned out decades ago by the louder voices of political opportunism and middle-class privilege.
In the same way, the technical issues of the approaching dein-dustrial transition were either solved long ago or could have been solved readily with modest investments in research and development. What could not be solved by scientific methods is the problem of finding the motivating factors and the political will to get these solutions put into place. Since this latter problem could not be solved by scientific methods, in turn, it has not been solved at all. This is the downside of the superlative technological efficiency of our age: those things we can’t do with our machines, or with the ways of thinking that we evolved to manage our machines, are for all practical purposes beyond our reach.
Thus, discussions about how to respond to peak oil, when these have not simply been exercises in denial or utopian fantasy, have tended to focus on finding ways to redefine the issues in technical terms so they can be dealt with by technical methods. We hear endless talk about finding new ways to fuel our cars, and very little about the tangled and dysfunctional human motives that make it seem logical to us to ghettoize our homes, worksites, and marketplaces at such distances from one another that a preposterously inefficient system of freeways, roads, and automobiles has to be used to bridge the distances among them. It’s all very reminiscent of the old fable about the drunkard who dropped his keys in a dark street and went to look for them under the streetlight half a block away, since there, at least, he could see what he was doing.
There’s a rich irony, in other words, in the common dismissal of the lessons of spirituality as “magical thinking,” because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that technical and scientific thinking handle so poorly. Americans dream of living in suburbs not because suburbs have any particular grace — most of them have all the worst features of cities and rural areas, while lacking the amenities of either — but because the modern suburban house, surrounded by its protective moat of grass, is a magical symbol brimful of potent cultural meanings. Americans drive preposterously oversized and overpowered cars, not because these are better than smaller and more sensible vehicles in any objective sense, but because they magically symbolize the freedom and power most Americans long ago surrendered to the cultural machinery of a mass society. For that matter, the hallucinated wealth that keeps our economy churning away with the mad single-mindedness–of some legendary goblin consists of sheer enchantment, with even less substance behind it than the moonbeams and fairy dust of a child’s wonder tale.
To speak of these issues in terms of magic is not, by the way, just a metaphor. Dion Fortune, one of the premier magical theorists of the 20th century, defined magic as the art and science of causing changes in consciousness at will.5 It’s predictable that a society fixated on seeing its own technology as the be-all and end-all of human achievement would misunderstand magic as a kind of failed physical technology, but that predictability makes modern attitudes about magic no less mistaken. This is hardly the place for a detailed discussion of magic, but for present purposes magic can be seen as the use of psychologically potent symbolism to influence consciousness and, through consciousness, the universe as we experience it. The advertising campaigns that seduce so many people into buying, say, fizzy brown sugar water, by associating it with symbols of happiness, self-esteem, or love, are good examples of magic at work — a debased magic, force-fitted into the manipulative mold of physical technology, but magic nonetheless.6
In recent years I’ve watched people in the peak oil community shake their heads in bafflement at the way that so many people seem to be sleepwalking toward the abyss, oblivious to the signs of imminent crisis all around them. Many of these reactions come from people who have no knowledge of magic and who wrinkle their noses in disgust at the mere mention of the word — yet they frequently use words like “trance” and “spell” in their discussions.
The crucial insight toward which they are moving, it seems to me, is that attempts to change the course of industrial civilization without changing the narratives and symbols that guide it on its way are doomed to failure; at the same time, those narratives and symbols cannot be changed effectively with the toolkit that peak oil advocates have used up to this point. Behind this difficulty lies a much vaster predicament — the failure of the Enlightenment project of rebuilding human civilization on the foundations of reason.
The Enlightenment (for those of my readers who received an American public school education — which in matters of history, at least, amounts to no real education at all) was an 18th century movement in European thought that laid most of the intellectual foundations for the modern world. The leading lights of the movement argued that the transformations that Galileo, Newton, and their peers made in the sciences needed to be made in the realms of social, political, and economic life as well. To them, the traditional ideologies that then framed European society amounted to one vast, festering mass of medieval superstition that was centuries past its pull date. Voltaire’s famous outburst against the Catholic church — Écrasez l’infâme! (“Chuck the wretched thing!”) — gave voice to a generation’s revulsion against a worldview that in their minds had become all too closely bound to bigotry and autocracy.
Mind you, there was quite a bit of truth to the charge. The upper classes of 18th century Europe had been as strongly affected by the Scientific Revolution’s disenchantment of the world as anyone else, and in their hands, traditional ways of thinking that once wove a bond of common interest among people of different classes turned into abstractions veiling brutal injustice. Like so many social critics, though, the thinkers of the Enlightenment combined a clear if one-sided view of the social problems of their day with unworkably utopian proposals for their solution. They argued that once superstition was dethroned and public education became universal, rational self-interest and dispassionate scientific analysis would take charge, leading society progressively toward ever better social conditions.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The ideology of the Enlightenment swept all before it, forcing even the most diehard reactionaries to phrase their dissent in terms the Enlightenment itself defined. That same ideology remains the common currency of social, economic, political, and religious thought in the Western world to this day. Though the myth of progress provided it with its most important narrative, it quickly evolved its own apocalyptic myths; some of these, like the narrative of Marxism, appealed to those who thought that the Enlightenment was not moving fast enough, while others, like the narrative of radical conservatism, appealed to those who thought the Enlightenment was moving too fast and in the wrong direction.
One of the consequences of the Enlightenment’s revolution in myth is our habit of producing rational plans for social improvement — a habit that spawned the torrent of peak oil solutions on the market today. Since Voltaire’s time, the idea that building a better social mousetrap will cause the world to beat a path to one’s door has pervaded our civilization. The irony, of course, is that neither in Voltaire’s time nor in ours has social change actually happened that way. The triumph of the Enlightenment itself did not happen because the social ideas circulated by its proponents were that much better than those of their rivals. It happened because the core mythic narrative of the Enlightenment, the myth of progress, proved to be more emotionally powerful than its rivals.
The resulting mismatch between our rationalist assumptions and the myths and symbols that still shape our behavior defines a faultline running through the middle of the modern mind. On the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it’s a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster. The language of rational self-interest and dispassionate scientific analysis itself has been incorporated into exactly the sort of mythic narrative it attempts to dismiss from serious consideration.
The crux of the problem, as I’ve suggested throughout this book, is that human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus, any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere. The founders of the Enlightenment recognized this and brought about one of the great intellectual revolutions of Western history by harnessing the power of myth in the service of their project. The very nature of their legacy, though, has made it much harder for others to recognize the role of myth in social change.
Thus it’s not accidental that the great storytellers of recent history, the figures who catalyzed massive changes in the world by the creative use of myth, have mostly come from the fringes of the Western cultural mainstream. Two examples are particularly worth citing here. The first is Mohandas Gandhi, who broke the grip of the British Empire on India by retelling the myth of European colonialism so powerfully that even the colonial powers fell under the spell of his story. He accomplished this by drawing on his own Hindu culture, as well as his Western education, to pose a challenge to the reigning narratives of the West that Western people had no way to counter. On the other side of the scale, but no less powerfully, Adolf Hitler came out of the crawlspaces of Vienna’s urban underclass with a corrupted version of Central European occult traditions, and he turned them into a myth that mesmerized an entire nation and plunged the planet into the most catastrophic war in its history. In rational terms, the story of either man’s achievements seems preposterous — another measure of the limits of reason and its failure to plumb the depths of human motivation.
If something constructive is to be done about peak oil and the rest of the predicament of industrial society, in other words, yet another round of reasonable plans will not do the trick. The powers that must be harnessed are those of myth, magic, and the irrational. What remains to be seen is whether these will be harnessed by a new Gandhi…or a new Hitler.
The City of Progress
All these issues can be phrased in a more forthright way, if we start with the admission that the present situation is ultimately a religious crisis. As the aspect of human life that links it back (in Latin, re-ligere, the root of the word religion) to its roots in the realm of ultimate concern, religion undergirds and defines every other aspect of a culture. When events bring a civilization’s most basic assumptions into question, it’s high time to look to the religious dimension of that civilization for the ultimate cause.
Mind you, the last few centuries of intellectual history make statements about religion remarkably easy to misunderstand. Like those people who use the word “superstition” only for those folk beliefs they don’t hold themselves, many people in the contemporary industrial world use the word “religion” purely for those belief systems that they don’t consider absolutely true. Equally, they insist that nothing can qualify as a religion unless it contains a set of beliefs (for example, the real existence of gods and the possibility of personal survival after physical death) that are specifically excluded from the religion most people in the industrial world follow today. This odd habit of thought has its roots in the complicated compromise between Protestant piety and nascent scientific materialism in 17th century Britain, but it remains firmly fixed in place today, and it makes clarity a real challenge in talking about the spiritual dimension of peak oil.
When I suggest that our current predicament has its roots in a religious crisis, then, I don’t mean to say Christianity has much to do with the matter. In most of the Western world, Christianity in its historic forms sank to the status of a minority religion several centuries ago. The illusion that it remained a majority faith rose because a newer faith took over its outward forms, in much the same way that a hermit crab takes over the cast-off shell of a snail and pulls it along behind it through the sand. That newer faith is the religion of progress, the established church and dogmatic faith of the modern industrial world.
Cultural critic Christopher Lasch, in his scathing study The True and Only Heaven, anatomized the way that the faith in progress eclipsed older religious traditions in the modern Western world, but even he didn’t take the argument as far as it can go. As I’ve suggested elsewhere in this book, to speak of progress as a religion is not to indulge in metaphor. Progress has its own creation myth, rooted in popular distortions of Darwin’s theory of natural selection that twisted the messy, aimless realities of biological evolution until it fit the mythic image of a linear ascent from primeval pond scum to the American suburban middle class. It has its saints, its martyrs, and its hagiographies, ringing endless changes on the theme of the visionary genius disproving the entrenched errors of the past. It has its priests and teachers, of whom the late Carl Sagan is probably the best known. Sagan, in fact, was arguably one of the most innovative theologians of the last century, with his mythic “We are star-stuff ” narrative that fused 19th century positivist philosophy with the latest theories out of astrophysics and evolutionary biology.7 Finally, of course, it has its own heaven, a grand vision of perpetual improvement toward a Promethean future among the stars.
It’s impossible to make sense of the predicament of the industrial world, it seems to me, without recognizing the sheer intellectual and emotional power of this vision. The religious revolution that made faith in progress the defining religious idiom of the modern world happened, in large part, because the progressive myth proved more emotionally appealing to more people than the narratives of Christianity it replaced. It’s one thing to expect people to anchor their hopes for a better world in the unknowable territory on the far side of death and trust completely in the evidence of things not seen; it’s quite another to encourage them to re-imagine the world they know in the light of technological and social changes going on right in front of them, trace the trajectory of those changes right on out to the stars, and embrace the changes themselves as vehicles of redemption and proofs of the imminence of a better world.
What the mythic power of the vision made it all but impossible to grasp, though, was that the progress of the last three hundred years, while very real, was the product of two temporary and self-limiting sets of circumstances.8 One of these unfolded from the wars of conquest and colonization that gave European nations control of most of the planet in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, enabling them to prosper mightily at the expense of the world’s other peoples, just as previous empires did in their times. The second and far greater circumstance was the discovery that fossil fuels could be used in place of wind, water, and muscle to power human technologies. From the perspective of the myth of progress, these things were simply side effects of the Western world’s embrace of a true doctrine of nature. The possibility that they were the causes of progress, not its effects, was unthinkable.
The weakness of the religion of progress, though, forms a precise mirror to its strengths. A religion that claims to justify itself by works rather than faith stands or falls by its ability to make good on its promises, and for the last few decades the promises of the religion of progress have been wearing noticeably thin. Despite a flurry of media ceremonies parading new technological advances before the faithful like so many saints’ relics, most people in the industrial world have begun to notice the steady erosion in standards of living, public health, and the quality of products for sale since the energy crises of the 1970s. Compare the lifestyle that was possible in the United States on a single working-class income in 1970, let’s say, with the lifestyle possible in the same country on a single working-class income today, and it becomes very hard to cling to the assurance that the future will inevitably be better than the past.
While the religion of progress is a relatively new thing, the predicament of a faith that fails to make good on its promises is not. One of the fundamental documents of the civilization that industrial society replaced, Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God, maps out that predicament with the brutal clarity only the eyes of a triumphant doctrinal opponent can manage. A few years before Augustine set pen to parchment, the Visigothic king Alaric tossed the most basic assumptions of the Roman world into history’s rubbish heap when his horsemen swept across southern Europe to the gates of Rome and sacked the city of the Caesars. The empire’s Pagan population, then still close to a majority, argued that the gods had deserted Rome because Rome had deserted her gods.
Augustine’s response launched shockwaves in the Western zeitgeist that have not entirely faded even today. In place of the pax deorum, the Roman Pagan concept of a pact between humanity and divinity that guaranteed the blessing of the gods on human society, Augustine argued that it was a fatal mistake to conflate the world of social life in historical time with the world of spiritual truth in eternity. The hard line of division he drew between two cities, the City of Man doomed to perish and the City of God destined to reign forever, put a full stop at the end of the long and by no means inglorious history of classical Pagan civil religion, and it defined a new religious consciousness that was able to cope, as classical Paganism could not, with the implosion of the ancient world and the coming of the Dark Ages.
Augustine’s distinction is typical, in many ways, of religious consciousness in ages of decline, just as the confident belief that ultimate truths stand guarantor to current social arrangements is typical of religious consciousness in ages of progress; the pax pro-gressus of the last few centuries mirrors not only the emotional tone but a surprising amount of the rhetoric of the pax deorum of ancient Rome. To the extent that anything like the medieval Christianity that Augustine played so large a role in founding survives in today’s Christian churches, it might conceivably become a significant social as well as religious resource as industrial civilization slides down the slope into its own dark ages. Yet there are many other possibilities. History never repeats itself exactly, and, as the industrial age draws toward its end, the prospect of a revival of some traditional Western faith must be balanced against the opportunities open to faiths from other cultures as well as newly created visions of destiny.
The Next Spirituality
It may be prophetic that science fiction — that cracked but not always clouded mirror of our imagined futures — so often makes religion central to narratives about a world after industrial civilization. That fashion was set in a big way by Walter M. Miller’s 1959 bestseller A Canticle for Leibowitz, which leapt past the then-popular–genre of nuclear holocaust novels to envision a centuries-long reprise of the Dark Ages, complete with Catholic monks guarding the knowledge of the past. Miller’s book covered quite a bit of philosophical and theological ground, but among its core themes was the argument that religion — specifically, of course, Catholic Christianity — was the wellspring of humanity’s better possibilities, and it would be more important than ever once progress betrayed the hopes of its votaries.
In the hothouse environment of mid-20th century science fiction, a retort from the opposition was not long in arriving. It came from Edgar Pangborn, whose award-winning 1964 novel Davy was in large part a counterblast aimed at Miller’s vision. In Pangborn’s future history, the collapse of industrial civilization was followed by the slow rise of a neomedieval society shackled to superstition and ignorance by the Holy Murcan Church. Like A Canticle for –Leibowitz, Davy covered quite a bit of intellectual ground. –Pangborn’s invented Murcan religion was at least as much a scathing satire on the American Protestant religiosity of his own time as it was an attempt to imagine a religion of the future. Central to Pangborn’s vision, though, was the argument that religion — any religion — was the zenith of human folly, an arrogant claim to privileged knowledge about the unknowable that inevitably lashed out violently against those too sane to accept its pretensions.
Of course these two arguments have been fodder for countless debates since Christianity lost its hold on the collective imagination of the Western world some centuries back. One feature of the dispute that deserves more attention than it has usually received, though, is the extent to which both sides present the choice between them as the only option there is. Such recent antireligious polemics as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, found their arguments explicitly on the insistence that the kind of religion represented by conservative Christians is the only kind worth debating, just as the equal and opposite polemics from conservative Christians commonly claim that any religion different from theirs is tantamount to Dawkins’ evangelical atheism. This sort of dualistic thinking comes so naturally to most people in the industrial world that those few works of science fiction that tried to suggest a third option languished in obscurity. Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin’s 1978 novel The Masters of Solitude, for example, a richly ambivalent tale of three-way struggle among Wiccans, Christians, and rationalists in a world two thousand years after the fall of the industrial age, received little attention, while Davy and A Canticle for Leibowitz both went through many editions.
One of the great factors fostering this sort of dualist thinking, of course, is the way it’s proven to be immensely profitable for the two mutually dependent sides of a great many disputes. Behind the quadrennial antics of the interchangeable Demublican and Repo–cratic politicians in the United States (or their equivalents in other industrial countries) lies a canny good cop-bad cop routine in which each side shakes down an assortment of captive constituencies by bellowing as loud as possible about how terrible a victory by the other side would be. The same routine underlies the relationship between atheism and fundamentalism. Yet it’s a mistake to assume that a dualism of this sort necessarily remains fixed in place forever.
The classical world provides a good example of the way such relationships can unravel. Well before the beginning of the Common Era, the religious landscape of the Greco-Roman world broke open along a line of fracture defined by the gap between an archaic polytheism rooted more in poetry than theology, and a rationalist movement among the political classes that sought individual perfection through moral philosophy. Relations between the two sides were never quite as bitter as the equivalent strains in our own culture; the decision of the Athenian court that condemned Socrates to death for introducing new gods was mirrored in Plato’s insistence that poets ought to be driven out of his imaginary Republic, but at the same time many Roman intellectuals argued that the re-ligio Romana was justified by its role in maintaining social order.
In classical times, the religious stalemate lasted until a third force — Christianity — entered the picture from outside. One of the foundations of Christian victory in the theology wars of the late classical world was the polemic the two older forces used against one another. Christian apologists could, and did, copy the philosophers in denouncing the gods of Olympus for their dubious morals, then turn around, borrow the rhetoric of the religious party, and assail the philosophers for their arrogance and impiety. It wasn’t until the end of the third century ce that philosophers such as Iamblichus and Proclus tried to build a united opposition to Christianity, and by then it was far too late. The classical world was already sliding down the slope of its own catabolic collapse, and the future of the Mediterranean world belonged to the new religious vision exemplified by Christianity and, a little later, Islam as well.
It’s very popular to see this transition as historically inevitable and to point to features in Christianity that make it “more advanced” than classical Paganism, but this simply rehashes the myth of progress in a different key. Comparative history from other societies suggests that things could just as well have turned out differently. In Nara- and Heian-period Japan, for example, a very similar divide between imported Buddhism and indigenous Shinto took a very different course. Japan found its equivalents of Iamblichus and Proclus much earlier, in the persons of Buddhist leaders such as Kobo Daishi and Dengyo Daishi who worked to establish common ground with the older faith, and the resulting accommodation proved to be so durable that a millennium and a half later, most Japanese still practice both faiths.
Despite all the arguments of historical determinists, history does seem to be contingent rather than determined — which is to say, of course, that in human affairs slight causes can have vast effects, so trying to predict the future is a risky proposition at best. This is true, above all, of religious history, where the blazing spiritual vision of a vagabond prince, a camel driver, or a tentmaker on the road to Damascus can catch fire in the imaginations of millions, sending the world careening down an unexpected path. Thus it would be a waste of time to point to one religious movement or another and proclaim it as the inevitable wave of the future. A glance at some of the possibilities might be worthwhile, but such a glance must be tempered with the recognition that history seems to take a perverse delight in embarrassing would-be prophets.
Still, for the religion of progress in any of its forms — the straightforward atheist anthropolatry of Richard Dawkins and his peers, or the quasi-theistic versions that use the forms of older faiths but redefine them in progressive terms — the coming of the deindustrial age promises a major crisis and most likely an epitaph in the bargain. As the limits to growth push industrial civilization further into its own spiral of catabolic collapse, the most fundamental assumptions of our modern faith in progress are likely to be tested severely, if not shattered. As I’ve suggested earlier in this book, the likely outcome is a social, psychological, and spiritual crisis of no small order. Nearly every dimension of today’s industrial society relies on the religion of progress to cover it with meaning and justification in the eyes of the political classes and the general public alike, and without that clothing many of today’s familiar social and economic arrangements will stand exposed to an almost indecent degree. In the resulting scramble for new garments, the likelihood is very high that our current faith in progress will be trampled underfoot.
The same fate lies in store for the secular apocalyptic faiths that have hijacked the rhetoric of the Enlightenment for their own uses. All of them, from old-fashioned Marxism to the latest neoprimi-tive ideologies, depend on the same assumptions as the myth of progress; they simply stand one or another of them on its head to suit the requirements of their particular challenge to the status quo. It’s quite possible that one or more of them will attract a mass following as industrial civilization winds down; such things happen often in the twilight years of civilizations, not least because blaming hard times on scapegoats is so easy. Still, if such ideologies do rise to power their success itself is likely to prove their undoing. Once their vision of Utopia stops being a tool for social critique and becomes a promise on which their leaders are expected to make good, few apocalyptic faiths survive for long.
The future will also probably not be kind to the various currently popular brands of religious fundamentalism. These present themselves as alternatives to today’s secular mythologies, but they have made themselves just as vulnerable to a future that shows no sign of conforming to their prophecies. A profound irony underlies the fundamentalist challenge to secular culture, for, in the process of confronting the religion of progress, the fundamentalist faiths have made their own religious traditions over in its image, seeking a fulfillment of their mythic visions as tightly focused on the world of history and political affairs as any atheist could imagine. It’s not accidental that most fundamentalist movements put conservative social issues at the center of their agenda, as though crusading for the social mores of a previous decade or century is what religion ought to be about, or that most of them have reduced their teachings to a collection of sound bites and slogans for convenience in marketing.9
The conservative wing of contemporary Protestantism, in many ways, has gone furthest in this process, just as the liberal wing has gone furthest in surrendering its traditional religious content and replacing it with platitudes about progress. It seems likely that both are on their way out, and they may well succeed in taking Protestantism with them. Catholicism, on the other hand, is potentially a very different matter. While American Protestantism has been losing members steadily for decades, the Catholic church has been holding steady, not least because so much immigration into North America today comes from predominantly Catholic countries. Demographics have worked very much in Catholicism’s favor, and they will very likely continue to do so. The great weakness of Catholicism is the immense financial burden of its current organizational superstructure, a burden that will become increasingly hard to bear as poverty spreads and Catholic laity find themselves forced to choose between supporting the hierarchy and their own economic survival. If the Catholic church can find a way to meet this challenge, perhaps by returning to its early medieval roots in a reaffirmation of the old monastic value of poverty, A Canticle for Leibowitz may not be as farfetched as it looks.
Buddhism, it seems to me, is also very much worth watching. While it still carries the reputation of an exotic foreign import, Buddhism has had a substantial presence in the Western world for more than a century, and of course it has successfully made the leap from culture to culture many times in the past. Buddhist monasteries can be found all over North America these days — there are three of them within a short drive of the small Oregon town where I live — and a religion that centers on the quest to find an answer to human suffering is likely to find attentive audiences over the decades and centuries to come, when the decline and fall of industrial civilization is likely to cause a great deal of unavoidable human suffering. If it can finish the process of acclimatizing itself to its new cultural settings in the West, as it did long ago during its spread across Asia, it could easily become a major factor in the North American religious scene for many centuries to come.10
Yet it’s also worth watching the fringes, and keeping an eye out for wild cards. Christianity, after all, was a legally proscribed minority faith only a few generations before it seized control of a crumbling Roman world. In a world shaped by the contingent and the unexpected, where slight causes can drive vast effects, some religious movement barely large enough to be noticed today might turn into the dominant religion of North America a few centuries down the road. Arnold Toynbee noted in his massive A Study of History that the downslope of civilizations forms the great incubator of religious movements.11 Rarely does this happen so dramatically as in times when the most basic assumptions of a civilization are visibly disproving themselves. This is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.
My own Druid faith, for all that, seems vanishingly unlikely to become anything like a major force in the religious landscape of the deindustrial future. Born in the 18th century out of a three-way pileup between mystical Anglicanism, fragmentary Celtic traditions, and the first stirrings of what we now call environmental awareness, the modern Druid movement is distinguished more by its tolerance of diversity and a wry sense of humor than by any sort of missionary fervor or mass appeal.12 Many contemporary Druids are aware of peak oil and the other dimensions of the predicament of industrial society, and they are taking action to respond to it. Most likely, though, it would take the abject failure of any other religious tradition to respond constructively to that predicament to push Druidry out of its current place as a relatively minor player in the alternative spirituality scene and make it a significant factor in the religious history of the future.
Still, whatever religion or combination of religions rises to prominence as industrial society slides down the rough slope of the Long Descent, the religious dimension will very likely play a massive role in the way that people adapt, or fail to adapt, to the world of harsh limits and harsher choices that the missed opportunities of recent decades have made inevitable. As the aspect of human life that deals with ultimate concerns, religion harnesses the most powerful of all human motivations, and it seems to me that any serious attempt to make something positive out of the approaching mess will have to draw on religious motivations, in one way or another, if it is to have any chance of meeting the challenges of our future. Thus, those who attempt to imagine the next economy, the next society, or even the next energy system might be well advised to take at least a passing glance in the direction of the next spirituality as well.