A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy -- The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer

[Demeter]

A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy

... Yes, I’m aware that many people believe that such a thing can’t happen: that science, technology, or some other factor has made progress irreversible. I’m also aware that many people insist that progress may not be irreversible yet but will be if we all just do that little bit more. These are—well, let’s be charitable and call them faith-based claims. Generalizing from a sample size of one when the experiment hasn’t yet run its course is poor scientific procedure; insisting that just this once, the law of diminishing returns will be suspended for our benefit is the antithesis of science. It amounts to treating progress as some sort of beneficent fairy who can be counted on to tap us with her magic wand and give us a wonderful future, just because we happen to want one.

The overfamiliar cry of “but it’s different this time!” is popular, it’s comforting, but it’s also irrelevant. Of course it’s different this time; it was different every other time, too. Neolithic civilizations limited to one river valley and continental empires with complex technologies have all declined and fallen in much the same way and for much the same reasons. It may appeal to our sense of entitlement to see ourselves as destiny’s darlings, to insist that the Progress Fairy has promised us a glorious future out there among the stars, or even to claim that it’s humanity’s mission to populate the galaxy, but these are another set of faith-based claims; it’s a little startling, in fact, to watch so many people who claim to have outgrown theology clinging to such overtly religious concepts as humanity’s mission and destiny.

In the real world, when civilizations exhaust their resource bases and wreck the ecological cycles that support them, they fall. It takes between one and three centuries on average for the fall to happen—and no, big complex civilizations don’t fall noticeably faster or slower than smaller and simpler ones. Nor is it a linear decline—the end of a civilization is a fractal process composed of crises on many different scales of space and time, with equally uneven consequences. An effective response can win a breathing space; in the wake of a less effective one, part of what used to be normal goes away for good. Sooner or later, one crisis too many overwhelms the last defenses, and the civilization falls, leaving scattered remnants of itself that struggle and gleam for a while until the long night closes in.

The historian Arnold Toynbee, whose study of the rise and fall of civilizations is the most detailed and cogent for our purpose, has traced a recurring rhythm in this process. Falling civilizations oscillate between periods of intense crisis and periods of relative calm, each such period lasting anywhere from a few decades to a century or more—the pace is set by the speed of the underlying decline, which varies somewhat from case to case. Most civilizations, he found, go through three and a half cycles of crisis and stabilization—the half being, of course, the final crisis from which there is no recovery...

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[cantbeserious]

1. New Archdruid Post Every Wednesday - Blog Archive Is Deep With Insights

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[Demeter]

2. I have reflected on this coming apocalypse from an engineering/education perspective

"Appropriate Technology" was the geeky side of the Green Movement: meaning, use the lowest quality materials and power possible for the job. Don't split the atoms to boil water to turn a turbine....go to hydro, wind, tides, solar. Don't chop down redwoods to make toothpicks, and more notions of that nature.

But if the premise that the End of WWII didn't solve a thing (which the Cold War, Vietnam, Reagan's little escapades, W's big ones, and Obama's foot-dragging have shown), then it's not a question of appropriate, any more. The question has dropped back several centuries to "SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY", in other words, everything that people knew before the Industrial Revolution, plus whatever we can keep alive from technological advances since then.

IF we are clever, and put an absolute ban on warfare of any kind, including economic (which refers to both the USA, China, AND the Pope and Fundies of all stripes that strive to prevent family planning), we might be able to sustain our technology for the foreseeable future.

Since that's not likely to happen, we need to take inventory.

WHICH technologies are sustainable at the 17th century level of civilization?
WHICH technologies might we convert to 17th century sustainability?
HOW do we keep the information gained in the past 250 years from being forgotten, misunderstood, or misapplied (again)?

Think of the areas of expertise we have to consider:

AGRICULTURE: good agricultural practices ended with the Industrial Revolution in large part, as farms turned into factories and eating local became a sign of backwardness. There's a lot of this that has to be re-applied, restored, renovated.

TRANSPORTATION: without transportation, the world shrinks to a day's travel on foot.
Modes of travel:

Foot & Swimming
Wheeled carts/ chariots / carriages / Draft animals
Sailboats / Wind-driven prairie wagons
Bicycles and other human-enhancing mechanics / Rowboats, paddle wheels

and already we are reaching into manufacturing technologies that aren't sustainable:

Flywheel-driven or enhanced / solar powered / steam driven mass transit / bio-diesel

Forget air travel, space travel, anything "wasteful". Manufacturing will have to scale down to the area in which it can be utilized. No sending coals to Newcastle, nor cheddar to Vermont. Making sensible choices will put most of our Useless Eaters/Obscenely Wealthy out of power, if there are any not hanging from lampposts.

MEDICINE: Just as the technology and the basic research is starting to catch up with the complexity of the human animal, we are in danger of reverting to cowpox inoculations. This just makes me mad. So little of the past 100 years of medical development will be sustainable through a hard collapse.

CLOTHING, SHELTER: Some rudimentary knowledge persists, and some skilled practitioners of ancient crafts. Insulation and passive solar design are the things we most need to keep current. Fashion will yield to practicality and warmth.

POWER: If the effort starts now, we might be able to keep solar, wind and water at modern levels of efficiency, which would make it possible to sustain our technology level. If not, say goodbye to:

COMMUNICATION: Quills and rust-based ink, anyone? Maybe the hand-operated printing press can be revived. Goodbye, Internet! It was nice knowing you.

MATERIALS SCIENCE: The biggest strides in technology have their roots in innovations in materials science: turning raw, unprocessed materials into something more useful: integrated circuits, super-conducting metals, plastics, graphene, buckyballs. Even anodizing requires power. Without the refined materials, technology isn't possible, no matter what Gilligan's Island portrayed.

THE GEEKS ARE GOING TO NEED HELP. NOBODY EVER WANTS TO HELP THEM, EITHER.

Geeks only get rewards when they invent cheaper ways to kill more people, thereby boosting profits for the profiteers. Geeks need peace, communications, refined materials, education and power.

Otherwise, as Spock said, it's back to the stone knives and bearskins. Except there won't be many bears.

Oh, wait, my sister's got a bear in her bird feeder, in a Mass. suburb...maybe the wildlife will come back in force!