The Long Descent (32 page)

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.

Afterword

O
ur civilization, as historian John Lukacz has suggested,
¹
has been haunted since its birth by an extraordinarily intense awareness of historical change. Other civilizations have been fascinated by history, of course. The medieval world that preceded modern industrial society, to name only one example, showed its passion for its own history in a wealth of local and national chronicles that scholars still study today. Still, the same monastic scribes who noted down every baronial feud and outbreak of plague in some small corner of medieval Europe saw nothing wrong in rewriting Biblical narratives and Classical history in the social terms of their own day, turning the patriarch Abraham and Alexander the Great into feudal grandees indistinguishable from the ones who galloped past their monastery gates.

When industrial civilization embraced a mythic narrative that centered on its sense of its own uniqueness, though, it set out on a course toward a radically different consciousness of history. Historians of the 18th century Enlightenment liked to contrast the reasonable consensus of their own time with the discarded beliefs of earlier ages. Their successors in the 19th century set themselves the task of chronicling those discarded beliefs and working out the ways of thinking that undergirded them. They succeeded well enough that by the middle of the 20th century, historians of ideas found themselves facing the uncomfortable realization that those discarded beliefs made just as much sense in their own time as the equally unproven assumptions of our own age make today.