The Last Refuge

[ecosophia]

I was delighted yesterday to learn from a reader that CounterPunch, one of the leading periodicals of the radical Left in the US, took the time out of its busy schedule to post a fine tirade by one Craig Collins insisting that modern industrial civilization won't decline -- it will collapse. What's more, it did me the courtesy of citing me as one of the leading figures among those wrongheaded people who suggest that our civilization will end the way every other civilization in human history has ended. 

Yes, I found this delightful, for two reasons. First -- well, do you recall Gandhi's famous quote? "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." For many years now the radical Left has treated the ongoing decline of industrial civilization as a temporary irrelevance, just another set of proofs that late capitalism was about to fall over dead to be replaced by some imaginary socialist paradise or other. More recently, a certain amount of shrill mockery has come from the radical Left when the reality of decline gets pointed out -- the phrase "declinism" got a certain amount of use in that context. Now, though, they're fighting; the next stage will follow in due time. 

You might be surprised, dear reader, that an article in a publication such as CounterPunch would insist on sudden collapse rather than, say, rallying yet again around the shopworn fantasy of proletarian revolution or what have you. You might be surprised, for that matter, that Collins proceeded to trot out the same talking points that apocalyptic fantasists have been using to insist on the imminence of sudden collapse since long before I started writing about the ongoing decline we're in. (Those of my readers who've been around since the days of The Archdruid Report already know all of Collins' four arguments well enough to repeat them in your sleep.) Still, that's to be expected at this point in the historical cycle. 

The reason why Collins and so many other people insist that we have to collapse -- we can't possibly decline like every other civilization in human history -- is that the ongoing reality of decline challenges the core act of faith at the heart of the modern mythology of progress: the belief that our civilization is unique and thus can ignore the lessons of history. (All four of Collins' arguments predictably boil down to exactly this:  "But we're special!")  A sudden cataclysmic collapse leaves the fantasy of progress intact; in a sick way, it can even feed into that fantasy -- "Look at us, we've progressed so far and so fast that we can even destroy ourselves!"  The process of decline that's going on all around us right now, by contrast, drives a stake through the heart of the fantasy and shows that despite our toys, we're following a historical arc that was old when bronze was the latest thing in high tech. 

There's another factor at work here, though. Follow the trajectory of apocalyptic fantasies through the history of ideas and you'll find that down through the centuries, in the Western world, belief in apocalypse is an admission of defeat. Social movements that are on the upside of their arc convince themselves that the world will improve, especially once they take control of as much of it as they can; it's when those hopes are blighted and the arc slopes downward that daydreams of imminent doom exert a potent emotional attraction. It's not quite true to say that it's all over for the American radical Left but the shouting, but it's heading in that direction -- and those of my readers who've watched the way that so many supposed liberals have rallied around the senile gerontocracy in DC in recent years, ditching their ideals right and left in order to concentrate on hating a populist movement that's actually improving the condition of working class Americans...well, let's just say that this latest bit is definitely writing on the wall. 

Comments

[ill_made_knight]

oh that was a good giggle. I remember having a convo with our friend Rhyd way back when over the same 4 talking points when he tried to convert me,heh. from my own perspective:
difference #1 no, "fire" has been and still is the main source of energy, regardless of whether the fuel is wood, fossil fuel or nuclear.
difference #2 only when you redefine capitalism that might be true. production and profit has always been a driving force in ancient civilizations from Sumer to Rome. That latter being probably the first 'industrialized' civilization, and that only in the west. Rome was already on the verge of coal use and development of steam power. their mining rates weren't surpassed until the 1950's, and we still basically use their mining techniques.
difference #3 eh, a petrie dish is a petri dish. localized or global it doesn't matter. it's the same effect/result.
difference #4 is no difference, heh. that hasn't changed for millennia...

[ecosophia]

Exactly. Every one of his four points could also be turned, by a believer in progress, into an argument for why we're heading onward and upward forever. The equal and opposite arguments cancel each other out, and we're left in the same condition as Nineveh and Tyre...

[(Anonymous)]

And don't forget that the Chinese were drilling for petroleum and natural gas 2000 years ago or that so many of the technologies we take for granted were invented by the Romans, the classical Chinese or the medieval Arabs. I remember watching news coverage a while back of flooding in southern France. There were modern bridges washing out left and right, while ancient Roman bridges survived with barely a scratch. Heck, it was the Romans who invented concrete more than 2000 years and constructed many of their greatest buildings from it.

Like the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun.

[(Anonymous)]

First, I want to state that I don't believe humans will go extinct because of the end of the industrial civilization.

With that said, maybe the bottom numbers will be a bit lower than you expect. Like it was written on the CounterPunch article, the unnatural depletion and environmental destruction brought by globalization might make the hole a bit deeper than what normally happens.

[ecosophia]

"Normal" in a full-on catabolic collapse involves a 95% decrease in population over the 1 to 3 centuries of the decline. That's what happened to the postclassical Maya, for example, and roughly corresponding rates of population loss can be traced in large parts of the western Roman Empire. I'm quite ready to concede that we're looking at roughly that level of decline globally -- bottoming out, say, at a worldwide human population of 350 million -- and in fact this is what I've been predicting for years now. Do you expect it to go lower than that? If so, why?

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations on getting denounced then!

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I was very pleased to see it.

[(Anonymous)]

The radical left strikes me as obscenely Plutonic (revolutionary, almost pornographically violent in imagery, the mocking derision of alternative views, plus the implicit ties to the Soviet Union), and so shouldn't they fade out as Pluto does? Thus, doesn't it make sense they're about to lose?

[ecosophia]

That's a good point, and worth factoring in. Thank you.

[ecosophian]

The most amusing feature of these supposed Socialists is how much they actually hate the working class people.

[ecosophia]

Socialists generally do. The job of working class people in Marxism is to provide the cannon fodder that a group of disgruntled middle class intellectuals can use to seize dictatorial power over society in the name of, but not for the benefit of, the working classes.

Freud rieds again

[(Anonymous)]

I misread your phrase "all over for the American radical Left but the shouting," as "all over but the shopping,"

Shades of GB jr!

Re: Freud rieds again

[ecosophia]

Ha! In a certain sense, yes...

[(Anonymous)]

We're all gonna die!! So therefore we must dispense with our freedoms and the means to defend those freedoms (nation-states, tribal affiliations, other cultural identities) and subordinate ourselves to a global social collective for the good of the species, a collective that will somehow operate *without* the abundant energy resources unleashed by fossil fuels and will provide good for all, whether we care for that good or not.

I'll pass. Give me a modest republic that minds its own business.

Here's to hoping that the electorate keeps looking at the alternatives we keep getting told don't exist!

--David BTL

[ecosophia]

It's becoming very hard for the establishment to pretend that the alternatives don't exist when job growth for unskilled and semiskilled labor keeps soaring. No question, it's a good year to go long on popcorn.

[(Anonymous)]

As you say JMG, people have always picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, looked around at the carnage and said, right, what can we get started on to get some things going again?
Right now, the capacity of the human spirit is needed more than ever.
As of yesterday, Mum's nursing home went into lock down and we've gone from 14-16 hours of us being there every day to zero.
All we can do as a family is stay positive, send prayers and positivity Mum's way and have faith that that staff can keep Mum stable mentally and emotionally. And keep ringing to check.
Mum's birthday is May 28. I had this idea lying in bed last night, to make some signs with all that birthday info on it and underneath saying we will be with her at the nursing home to celebrate it with her on that day and sticking them up around my house.
What do you think about that, is that a kind of magical working?

Regards, Helen in Oz

[ecosophia]

I think it's an excellent idea. You might also consider going out and buying a present for her. Wrap it, sign the card, and do everything else you would do, also with the focused intention that you'll be giving this to your Mum on her birthday.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes!
Even better, I'll make her one!

Thanks for the suggestion!

[peristaltor]

For your continuing amusement, he almost had to attack Pinker. Having seen Pinker speak, and judging him as not [what people say], this amused me.

Pinker gave a TED talk based on his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he pointed out that life for humans have gotten better overall. "Pinker's actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interpersonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a log free fall." (Citation at end.)

Which made what happened next surprising:

…his talk became a cult favorite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners. It did so… because it contented a justification for keeping the social order largely as is.

[F]or many who heard the talk, it offered a socially acceptable way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop their complaining.

(Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, p. 126.)

Worse, these extremely wealthy people even turned Pinker's name into a verb: "Pinkering," which is:

…using the long-term direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which "is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class."

(Ibid.)

So, yeah, with the über-wealthy supporting Pinker, the Counterpuncher needed to attack him if only to attack "his ardent audiences."

[(Anonymous)]

(Tolkienguy)


The thing about Pinker is...the world isn't really "getting better." If you confine your analysis to the Western world, yeah. But if you look at say, the Middle East or Africa, "interpersonal violence as a way of solving problems" has, if anything, ticked upwards.

And now, Pinker is going to come in with his smug smile and say this doesn't count, because we're the developed world, and they're the "developing" world. They just haven't gotten our glorious enlightment, the benighted fools. Give it another century or two.

I would invite everyone who thinks the world is "getting better" to read this article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/ao726ind7u/shipbreaking) from BBC. Its about the Alang shipbreaking yard, one of those benighted Third World places Pinker triumphantly proclaims we're moving away from. Alang is a long stretch of beach in Gujrat, India, that is used for scrapping ships. Except very few of them are Indian ships. They're American, and British, and German, and other Western ships-but they contain hazardous materials like asbestos that are extremely expensive to expose of properly. So what does our civilization do? We sail them to places like Alang and drive them onto the beach, where a bunch of Indians with cutting torches swarm over them. In other words, instead of solving a problem we created, we just exported it.

Furthermore, if you really read into the history of the "Developing" world, this becomes something of a theme. Want rare earth metals so we can build cheap cell phones? Buy them from the Congo. I mean, who cares if they were dug out of the ground by overworked slaves in a mine owned by a Congolese warlord? We need our iphones, dammit. Or to use another of Pinker's favorite examples, Russia and America didn't, ourselves, fight the Cold War...we just had our proxies in the Third World do it. In the name of fighting communism, we allied with people who can only be described as moral monsters (look up SAVAK, the Greek Junta, or Mobutu Sese Seko sometime) and funneled them all the money and guns they could want, pouring gasoline onto dozens of ethnic conflicts in the process. The Cold War was not peaceful, its battlegrounds were just in conveniently out of the way places-the Congo, Angola, Iran, Argentina, Lebanon, Cambodia. Places were millions of people died who probably would not have had their countries not been flooded with AK-47s and M-16's, had their politics not been taken over by whatever thug would say nice things to the CIA about freedom, or to the Soviets about the Proletarian Revolution. American tax dollars happily went to fund the death squads of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua-and to this day, it isn't even talked about in mainstream political circles.

India did not create Alang. Angola did not create the Angolan civil war. We and the Soviets did. We didn't end violence, or pollution-we exported them. To this day, we live in comfort while millions around the world starve, because wealth has been steadily funnelled out of their countries to Europe and America for the past four centuries. After 1950, America, Europe, and Russia lived in peace, while in the rest of the world, millions died conflicts provoked and sustained by American, European, and Russian intelligence agencies.

If you're wondering how anybody could have the chutzpa to tear up half the world, impoversh it, steal its wealth, give its worst thugs all the guns for all the slaughter they could ever want, and then crow about how much better we are than them-well, now you understand why Pinker irritates me so much. If a mugger broke into your house, stole all your savings, then walked around bragging about how much richer he was than you...you'd probably hate him too.

[(Anonymous)]

In response to my comment on the other blog about how it seemed my most leftward friends appeared to be the ones having the biggest coronavirus meltdowns, as part of a general trend of increasing irateness, you thought that perhaps that meant a driving fear under their behaviour was that they would be forgotten - the realisation that their lives are not as relevant as they thought and would be lost to history.

I've been thinking about that, because I'm not sure it's still quite right, and I think you've got another piece here. My friends I'm thinking of are primarily Xennials (37 to 43) - not quite as bitter at their economic marginalization as X, but close, not quite as idealistic and raised to believe Everyone Is Special as the Millenials, but on the beginning of the changes in childhood that bred it. Hmm...a lot of real Xers, too, come to think of it. The fear of not being the people eternally remembered as the ones who Ended History seems more Boomer... which I do see in some older relatives - or younger Millenial. I imagine that is a great deal of it.

But this... that we can collectively *ignore* the lessons of history... they're the ones really enamoured with Communism and Socialism and belonged to the university Marxist clubs. THIS TIME they know how to get it right, though. As God.. er.. Marx... intended.

They know how Little Crow's stand ended. They know what happened to Joan of Arc. They SHOULD know about the blood on their hands. But they really, really want to not have to remember that. They use all this fighting and war language talking about stopping global warming. Ending all suffering and death, with absolutely no suffering or death caused by that war. A huge proportion of their self-concept is in being the people who are More Ethical than Others. More Woke, right. They don't really want people to be less racist, they want them to know they think they're disgusting for being racist. For eating meat. Whatever. But if you start to realise your war will be bloody after all, no matter what, because that's what WAR means... do you instead just long for the war - the global cataclysmic change in society - to occur without you having to be ethically implicated? They fear being Ethically Impure or - worse! - having their descendants come to view them as Impure the way they view everyone now who came before them. Not that they'll be forgotten... but that they will be remembered but not the way they think they ought to be. Their history will be reinterpreted and rewritten the same.

Not forgotten - but deliberately IGNORED. Ignored the way they believe everyone is ignoring all the issues of importance. All the perfect solutions they offer that no one will listen to. And the way that Gen X has essentially been ignored and erased from every Which Generation is Ruining Everything Today? fight of the last 20 years. Is fear of being ignored vs. fear of being forgotten in irrelevance meaningfully different in repercussions, in how to counteract it? I don't know. If you want to fight, but fear first the ignoring AND the laughing, AND the fighting... do you ever really believe you can win?

-SD

[ecosophia]

Fascinating. Okay, that makes a great deal of sense.

[(Anonymous)]

I've always had a problem with the concept of 'what you contemplate you imitate'. The joke that came to mind was 'wouldn't that make Holocaust historians some of the most dangerous people in the world?' :) But it does have resonance discussing the Left. Marx's most substantial work was Das Kapital. That was necessary at the time, but things don't seem to have moved on. I'm so tired of reading books with titles like The Future Anarchist Utopia and three quarters of it or more is just criticism of capitalism.

Revolutions are commonly associated with turning out like the Soviet Union, but there were also revolutionary socialist movements against communist rule. Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, and Poland 1980-81 are illustrative of what revolutions look like by people who know exactly how they don't want it to turn out. :)

[ecosophia]

Maybe not Holocaust historians, but have you noticed how many of the people who like to scream "Nazi!" at anyone they dislike have ended up adopting typical Nazi policies such as hostility to free speech and enthusiastic approval of violence against their political enemies?

But you're right about Marxism et al. I've always appreciated the joke very common in Russia during the Yeltsin era: "Everything Marx wrote about Communism was false, but everything he wrote about capitalism is true..."

[booklover1973]

The examples for apocalyptical thinking from the Left which I could post are legion. Lastly, they come thick and fast, so not a single day passes that I encounter some examples on the Internet. One thing that stands out that often they are longish, more or less intellectual essays, and more and more often rants with parts of the text written in bold and/or cursive or upper-case letters, endlessly repeating the idea that "we must come all together" and "we must do this or that". They are quite repetitive. One of many, many, examples is an article where the writer complains, that people get an one-time financial help of $1000 in respect to the coronavirus situation; the ostentative base of the criticism is that this falls short of an Universal Basic Income. I suspect that the real cause is that the writer is angry about ordinary people getting money in a difficult situation.

Furthermore, the whole relation the left has towards nationalism, racism, internationalism, and what they call "international solidarity" shows quite clear that the beliefs of the Left simply are an anti-religion to nationalism, where all values of nationalism, chauvinism, white suprematism and patriotism are inverted 180 degrees.

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this! Yeah, "We must" in the mouth of a political intellectual inevitably translates as "We won't."

Where do Ecosophic Bernie fans go?

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,

What advice do you have for a disillusioned Bernie voter?

I can't in good conscience vote for Trump because he gives tax cuts to the rich and isn't interested in raising the minimum wage. He's done things I agree with, like the tariff with China that has improved the lives of some working class communities in the US. That's better than Hilary would have done, but I wasn't a fan of Hilary anyways.

I work in the gig economy: very precarious income, part-time, unstable, high stress. I'm poor and miserable.

Bernie is the only candidate who actually cares about the working class, rather than Trump who is willing to "bring the goods" just enough to get reelected. Trump knows he has to throw a bone to the masses, which again is better than Hilary or Biden would do, but it doesn't compare to what $15 an hour would do to my life.

For the Bernie people who read ecosophia and agree with a lot of what you have to say, where should we go from here?

(Hopefully this doesn't need to be said, but to the commentariat, please do not accuse me of certain beliefs just because I support Bernie. I've had the experience of people saying "A SJW did something ridiculous online, and therefore I blame this on you!" That's a weird logical fallacy, and doesn't represent every Bernie supporter.)

Re: Where do Ecosophic Bernie fans go?

[ecosophia]

For what it's worth, I don't think Sanders would have done any more than throw some scraps to the working classes either. There's good reason to be skeptical of a multimillionaire who claims to believe in socialism!

The challenge you face now is that of getting past fixation on a personality to build a movement aimed at pursuing the things that matter to you. You're in the same situation as the gay and lesbian people who wanted the right to same-sex marriage. If they'd just kept on voting for Democrats, on the presumption that at least they weren't Republicans, they'd still be waiting. Instead, they built a coalition around the issue that mattered to them, brushed aside attempts by the political mainstream to co-opt them into supporting existing power structures, pushed hard for what they wanted, and got it. You can do the same thing, if you can make a case for what you want that will convince other people to back you.

On the other hand, you can stay fixated on personalities, and continue to be disappointed.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh my goodness. I am a leftist myself, and It's embarrassing how many of the people I follow are perfectly described by all of this. Just yesterday I answered a twitter thread of a guy who said

"Spoiler alert............There is no future"

Everyone was frolicking in the mental imagery of an eschaton. It reminds me of my days as an active addict. At the bottom of every drag of weed smoke, there was a desire for me to not come back from the void.

[ecosophia]

Fascinating. Thanks for this!

[drhooves]

My two cents would be to add the Conservative/Reactionary Right will be under a similar awakening to the new realities, just better equipped mentally to deal with the challenges. Here in the heart of flyover/deplorable land, $50K pickup trucks and SUVs rule the road, McDonalds' drive throughs are jammed, and "Keep America Great" is the mantra. Even as the economy keels over, I expect Trump may benefit from the "don't change horses mid-stream" strategy when under wartime-like conditions come November. And wartime is what it's looking like for a while now. Besides, Biden strikes me as a guy who would have trouble finding his way out of a phone booth.

My takeaways from the ideas around decline seem to center on binary thinking and self-centeredness. "If we're not going to Mars, we're heading to hell." I wonder if that's a symptom of the computer age. "Everything is fine, quit you're whining - until I lose my job - then it's a problem, because it can't be my fault."

This idea of social distancing has been in play for a long, long time as the elites have pushed values and systems down on the herd to isolate us. I expect to see a boomerang back to closer-knit communities and organizations again - just as soon as we're allowed to be in the same room again...

[ecosophia]

That seems quite reasonable.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

Do you have any advice on how to stay optimistic and productive in times like these? With industrial civilization on the long downward slope of decline, our culture being a mess, and things generally becoming ever more dysfunctional, it can sometimes be difficult to summon up the courage to get out of bed in the morning. It's clear that we will have to deal with this situation for the rest of our lives, in all likelihood. It's hard to see the light in this situation.

[ecosophia]

You've just pointed out the supreme downside of the myth of progress -- it tricks people into thinking that hope is only possible in a world that's always getting better. As the ongoing decline of industrial civilization accelerates, that's going to be a massive liability. The first thing to remember is that while our civilization on the whole is in the process of decline, that doesn't mean that everything must decline, or that the process must continue in a linear fashion. Au contraire, while things decline overall there's plenty of room for movement in the other direction, in specific places and times -- and making that happen is work for those with guts. I'm reminded of a quote from an old comic book that helped me get through some hard times:

"Heed you now these words: 'Tis not by dropping out – but by plunging in – into the maelstrom of life itself – that thou shalt find thy wisdom! There be causes to espouse! There be battles to be won! There be glory and grandeur all about thee – if thou wilt but see!"

Yes, that's the Mighty Thor in his comic book manifestation. It's still good advice.

Thor

[ecosophian]

Cinematic Thor agrees:

I choose to run toward my problems and not away from them

Science will save us

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG

Interesting article on bbc :
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51963486

The thing that caught my attention was at the end:

“I asked the UK's chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, what his exit strategy was.

He told me: "Long term, clearly a vaccine is one way out of this and we all hope that will happen as quickly as possible."

And that "globally, science will come up with solutions". “

So... wishful thinking is now officially the government exit strategy for a pandemic.

Re: Science will save us

[ecosophia]

Yep. The one thing that makes this less than totally absurd is that epidemics are one thing that mainstream medicine is tolerably good at treating, and there are already vaccines and treatments in the testing stage. Still, what else is he going to say? "A lot of old people will die, and then it will be over with" doesn't sound good on TV...