Greer begins with the premise that industrialization is on the way out and that we're headed for a deindustrial future. He's rather dispassionate and non-alarmist about it, though, and forecasts a self-limiting “long descent” spanning multiple generations. He also writes with a level of certainty that, given the subject matter, I find off-putting, but Greer is a religious leader and I'm understanding that all religions, even fringe ones, have in common that their leaders are not in the business of being uncertain—even if it's being certain about being uncertain.
What I can't help but wonder is if the online peak-oil community is, on the whole, suffering from a chronic lack of imagination. What will the technology-scape of the future look like? Greer asserts that not believing in a deindustrial future is akin to succumbing to the myth of progress. I'm sure we all can agree, optimists and pessimists alike, that the world one hundred years from now won't look exactly like the one we have now. Some people imagine that future world vastly superior to ours; others imagine it as vastly inferior; others still lie somewhere between the two extremes.
Take a cue from Eric Chaisson's idea of complexity and quantify the question by asking, “What will the per capita energy flow be in the future compared to now? Higher? Lower? About the same?” Currently, industrialized individuals consume, on average, about a hundred units of exothermic energy for every one unit of endothermic energy—which is to say between 200,000 and 300,000 kilocalories per day and an order of magnitude higher than even a few hundred years ago. I think that Greer is probably right in that the per capita energy flow of the future will probably be lower than today. Oil is special: oil is too non-fungible to be replaced by any one fuel source. Thermodynamics: it's difficult to capture energy from sunlight in real time compared to burning over a few hundred years what was captured over many millions of years via fossil fuels. Shrinking pie: it's exactly when you begin running out of a resource and see the need to rebuild your infrastructure around different ones that you find yourself least capable of doing so. Yes, these are important points, and I would argue that we should be thinking hard about these sorts of things on an individual basis. What I don't follow is how these sorts of ideas necessarily lead to a deindustrial future. A decline? Yes. Deindustrialization? Who knows.
This whole idea of the rises and falls of civilizations led me to the public library, section 901, to grab a copy of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. While there (in the 901 section), I saw another book, titled Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr. It seemed to me that if deindustrialization is what we're possibly facing, it might be good to bone up on some medieval technology, so I checked out White's book along with Spengler's.
Medieval Tech is academic history. I happen to like books whose context half resides within the footnotes, but I thought I may have outdone myself when I soon realized that White didn't bother translating his Latin sources to English. But I plunged ahead and began learning what, at first, seemed like minutiae: the archaeological and philological nuances of placing the exact date when the stirrup was introduced to Europe sometime several hundred years after its invention in the East. Lynn's style is enjoyable, and as I continued reading, I began to see his bigger picture. The stirrup, he writes, had a profound change on military tactics; it directly led to the shift to mounted shock combat. It's hard to attack an enemy with a lance using the full power of the horse without yourself being knocked backwards off the horse unless your feet are firmly attached. Without the stirrup, a horse-mounted attack is only as strong as the rider; with the stirrup, the attack is nearly as strong as the horse itself.
The effects of the shift to mounted shock combat was not relegated to medieval battlefields. The effects were widespread economically and socially. The shift away from the infantryman of classical times and to the mounted warrior of medieval times quickly gave way to vassalage and the rise of the knight class. This follows from the premise that the maintenance of horses requires much land, and so political and economic power inexorably became bound to land ownership. With the stirrup and the subsequent rise of mounted shock combat, rather than conscripting ten or so peasants and equipping them to be infantrymen in your army, it now was more effective to have those ten or so peasants pool together their resources to equip one mounted warrior among them. Mounted fighters requires more skill and training than infantrymen, and so this led to an elevated, privileged knight class.
Is this bottom-up or top-down? Lynn argues how the stirrup led to the rise of feudalism: the proliferation of horses, the rise of the knights, vassalage, and so on. And yet perhaps the invention of the stirrup was itself a consequence of the fall of the Roman Empire. Of course, nothing about the fall of the Roman Empire directly led to the invention of the stirrup, but necessity is the mother of invention, and with the fall of the Roman Empire, the military tactics of the last 1,000 years—creating and leveraging many legions comprising limitless numbers of infantrymen—suddenly became infeasible in the political and economic vacuum of the dark ages. Huge legions are expensive for a civilization to maintain, resource-wise. With Europe broken up into poorer, fragmented kingdoms and the westward push of the Muslims serving as a real threat to security, it seems that military leaders would have begun looking for a different way to carry out war. But who knows the real reason. Here's a passage from Medieval Technology.
The historical record is replete with inventions which have remained dormant in a society until at last—usually for reasons which remain mysterious--they `awaken' and become active elements in the shaping of a culture to which they are not entirely novel. It is conceivable that Charles Martel, or his military advisers, may have realized the potential of the stirrup after it had been known to the Franks for some decades. However, the present state of our information indicates that it was in fact a new arrival when he used it as the technological basis of his military reforms.One interest of mine is discovering our ideological blind spots: ideas that we are incapable of thinking about clearly, owing to stubbornness, emotions, etc. What are we missing that's right in front of our noses? For example, I find that many people struggle to frame problems in such a way where no solution is evident. Faced with such a “predicament”, as Greer labels it, people often resort to wishful thinking and other irrationalisms so that the problem can be said to have a solution, regardless of whether the new way the problem is framed has much if anything to do with reality.
My preferred historical narrative is that of comparative history. Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, was a comparative historian. Wikipedia tells me that comparative history is the “comparison between different societies at a given time or sharing similar cultural conditions.” It relies upon the use of analogy and metaphor to develop an understanding of the world's past, present, and future. It's also happens to have been out of favor since the 1950s, along with the popular comparative historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee.
Comparative history differs from more conventional, academic approaches to history in that it emphasized a top-down view of the world. It views civilizations as entities unto themselves, growing, thriving, and dying in accord to their own “biological” patterns and causes. Medieval Tech definitely is not comparative history. The Decline of the West definitely is.
I reason that my top-down, comparative-history point-of-view saddles me with my own set of ideological blind spots. By pursuing a comparative understanding of history and by inferring through analogy historical patterns that may actually be noise, I am more apt to say, “This time, nothing is different.” For if this time things were different, there wouldn't be much point to comparing past civilizations with current ones. Our civilization will have its winter like every other and give way to succeeding civilizations' springs. A believer in what Greer calls the myth of progress obviously believes otherwise; he is more apt to say, “This time, it is different.” Our civilization will not fall like every other; we will continue making the world a better place.
The hat of comparative history fits me well, but I can take it off from time to time and suppose that the truth probably lies somewhere between these two points of view. Medieval Technology isn't only about the stirrup: it covers the heavy plough, three-field crop rotation, the crank and other forms of rotational power. What's clear is that the middle ages, despite their economic and political stagnation, were not at all technologically stagnant; humans continued finding new ways to solve problems right on up to and through the Industrial Revolution. Take the crank as an example. It's an exceeding common and intuitive device for modern man, providing a method of converting between reciprocal and rotating motion, yet its invention and adoption occurred only about 1,200 years ago. Its adoption, however, sparked a range of additional rotation-related devices, such as the clock.
Whether it counts as progress or not, humans continue to innovate. I think this is an important point to consider before extrapolating our civilization's decline to be symmetrical to its ascent—and especially before predicting its decline to be imminent. Not all inventions since the Industrial Revolution will be tossed out in a lower-energy future. Machining, for example, was a young and fertile technology when industrialization began, and so it's unclear what we would be left with if we lost industrialization. It probably won't look like the 18th century, however.
Then again, it's not so hard to reconcile Medieval Technology with Greer. White gave a lecture related to medieval technology in the mid-1960s titled The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. According to the Wikipedia article:
[White] posited that these [Western, medieval] beliefs have led to an indifference towards nature which continues to impact in an industrial, “post-Christian” world. He concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem won't help, it is humanity's fundamental ideas about nature that must change; they must abandon “superior, contemptuous” attitudes that make them “willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim.” White suggests adopting St. Francis of Assisi as a model to imagine a “democracy” of creation in which all creatures are respected and man's rule over creation is delimited.Here, four decades prior, is a pre-echo of Greer's assertion that our current “predicament” is one that cannot be solved by conventional means—more of the same—and that we need a new narrative, a new myth to replace the myth of progress. And so the circle completes. Greer's message leads me to the 901 section of the library for a book of comparative history; on a lark I happen to read something different and am led back to Greer's message, spoken two generations ago.
So is it different this time or not?
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