The Long Descent (30 page)

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,”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.