The Long Descent (8 page)

The Hollywood notion of an overnight collapse is just as much of a fantasy. It makes for great screenplays but has nothing to do with the realities of how civilizations fall. In the aftermath of –Hubbert's peak, fossil fuel production will decline gradually, not simply come to a screeching halt, and so the likely course of things is gradual descent rather than freefall, following the same trajectory marked out by so many civilizations in the past. Nor does decline necessarily proceed at a steady pace; between sudden crises come intervals of relative stability, even moderate improvement. Different regions decline at different paces; existing social, economic, and political structures are replaced, not with complete chaos, but with transitional structures that may themselves develop pretty fair institutional strength.

Does this model of punctuated decline apply to the current situation? Almost certainly. As oil and natural gas run short, economies will come unglued and political systems disintegrate under the strain. Nonetheless, there will still be oil to be had — the –Hubbert curve is a bell-shaped curve, after all, and if the peak comes in 2010, the world in 2040 will be producing about as much oil as it was producing in 1980. With other fossil fuels well along their own Hubbert curves, nearly twice as many people to provide for, and a global economy dependent on cheap, abundant energy in serious trouble, the gap between production and demand will become a potent source driving poverty, spiraling shortages, rising death rates, plummeting birth rates, and epidemic violence and warfare. Granted, this is not a pretty picture, but it's not an instant reversion to the Stone Age either.

It's reasonable, of course, to consider sudden catastrophe and continued progress as possibilities for the future, but both of these narratives have to be weighed against the realities of our present situation and the evidence of history. In our present context, both possibilities require a
deus ex machina
on a grand scale to change the course of events: ordinary catastrophes aren't enough to bring industrial society down overnight, just as ordinary technological progress isn't enough to get industrial society out of the mess it's made for itself. Without some extraordinary event, our civilization is headed down the well-trodden path of decline. If there's a point in planning for the future at all, it makes sense to plan for the one we're most likely to get.

Both the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse, on the other hand, have a great deal of emotional power; that's why they're popular. Faith in perpetual progress comforts those people who have made their peace with society as it is and want to believe that the frustrations and compromises of their lives are part of a process that will eventually lead to better things. Faith in imminent apocalypse comforts those people who cannot accept society as it is; they long for a catastrophe massive enough to topple the proud towers of a civilization they loathe. Still, the fact that a belief is emotionally powerful and comforting doesn't make it true.

Secondhand Theologies

The central theme of both these myths, the narrative of progress just as much as the narrative of apocalypse, is a process the philosopher Eric Voegelin called “immanentizing the eschaton.”
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This process underlies a remarkable amount of popular thought these days, and it's worth taking the time to understand what it means and how it works.

The word “eschaton” comes from an old Greek word for “end” or “border.” In Christian theological jargon it refers to the process by which the fallen world we experience today will someday give way to the eternal blessedness of the Kingdom of God. An entire branch of theology, called eschatology — literally, the science of the end — evolved over the last two thousand years or so in an attempt to piece together a coherent vision of the future out of the hints and visions provided by scripture and tradition. It's a lively field full of fierce disputes, and no consensus about the End Times has yet found general acceptance among Christian theologians or ordinary believers. Central to nearly all Christian accounts of the eschaton, however, is the idea that it's something completely outside the realm of history as we know it. When the trumpet sounds, the sky tears open and something wholly other comes through.

There's a long and complicated history behind this belief, reaching back half a dozen centuries before the Common Era, when religions across much of the Old World started offering believers the promise of a way out of the cycles of time and the world of suffering — and a way into an eternal realm of perfection. For the most part, the escape hatch from time was sized only for individuals; the Buddhist pursuit of Nirvana and the Gnostic quest to return to the aeonic world of light are good examples of the theme. In a handful of traditions, though, this mutated into the idea that the whole world would enter eternity at a specific point in the future: ordinary history would stop and be replaced by something wholly other. The Jewish vision of the coming Messianic Age is among the oldest of these. Adapted by Christianity, it became the prophecy of the Second Coming, and in this latter form it remains a potent myth through much of the Western world.

In theologian's language the quality of “otherness” that pervades visions of the Second Coming and its equivalents is called transcendence. Its opposite is immanence. One of the great quarrels in theology is whether God or the gods are transcendent — that is, outside nature and free of its limitations — or immanent — that is, part of nature and subject to its laws. Like most such divisions, this one admits of several kinds of middle ground, but the basic distinction is relevant. People who have mystical experiences — which are, after all, common among human beings — very often comment on a difference between the ordinary reality of their lives, and the non-ordinary reality that surges into their consciousness. Did the non-ordinary reality come from someone, something, or somewhere outside ordinary existence? Or was it right here, unnoticed, all the time? That's the difference between transcendence and immanence.

Most religions that put a great deal of attention into eschatology also have a transcendent concept of the divine; the whole point of the eschaton is that ordinary reality dissolves into the wholly other. Most religions that have an immanent concept of the divine, in turn, either have no eschatology at all, or make the end of the world a recurring event in an endlessly repeated cycle of time. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with their transcendent god and richly detailed eschatologies, fall on one side of the divide. Religions such as Hinduism, with its universes that bud, blossom, and fall through infinite cycles of time, and Shinto, which has no eschatology at all, fall on the other. So does the Druid spirituality I practice, which recognizes the presence of spirit throughout the world of nature and sees spiritual awakening as something that comes to each soul in its own proper time.
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Now and then, though, the two patterns collide and cross-fertilize, and the resulting belief systems locate the eschaton as a possibility to be realized within ordinary history, or even the inevitable result of the working out of historical patterns. The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, more than anything else, was responsible for putting this new wrinkle in the old myth. To the founders and early propagandists of modern science, human beings didn't need to wait for God to bring on the New Jerusalem; it could be built here and now by harnessing the power of human reason to dominate the world of nature.
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As a newfound faith in progress redefined the past as a tale of the slow triumph of reason over nature, the Western world embraced a paradoxical vision in which history itself brought about an end to history. Focused through thinkers as different as Hegel and Terence McKenna, this way of thinking about history still remains welded into place in the conventional wisdom throughout our society. For people at all points on the cultural spectrum, as a result, the perfect society remains firmly parked in the near future, accessible once the right set of political, social, or spiritual policies are put into place.

Marxism offers an example familiar to most people nowadays. In Marxist theory, history is determined by changes in the mode of production that unfold in a fixed order, from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism to the proletarian revolution and the everlasting communist Utopia of the future. While all this is wrapped in the jargon of 19th century materialist science, it's not hard to see the religious underpinnings of the theory, because every element of Marxist theory has an exact equivalent in Christian eschatology. Primitive communism is Eden, the invention of private property is the original sin that causes the Fall. The stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are the various dispensations of sacred history, and so on, right up to the Second Coming of the proletariat, the millennial state of socialism, and the final arrival of communism as a New Jerusalem descending from some dialectical-materialist heaven. Point for point, it's a rephrasing of Christian myth that replaces the transcendent dimension with forces immanent in ordinary history.

Over the last three centuries or so, Christianity's influence on the Western intellect has crumpled beneath the assaults of scientific materialism, but no mythology has yet succeeded in ousting it from its place in the Western imagination. The result has been a flurry of attempts to rehash Christian myth under other, more materialistic names. The mythology of progress itself is one example of this sort of secondhand theology. Marxism is another, and most of the more recent myths of apocalypse reworked the Christian narrative along the same lines that Marx did, swapping out the economic concepts Marx imported to the myth for some other set of ideas more appealing to them or more marketable to the public.

Neoprimitive theorists such as John Zerzan and Daniel Quinn, for example, replace Marxist economics with anthropology. For them, the hunter-gatherer societies of the prehistoric past are Eden, the invention of agriculture is the original sin that led to the Fall, and so on, with the imminent collapse of civilization filling the role of the apocalyptic transformation, after which the righteous remnant enters the New Jerusalem of the hunter-gatherer–lifestyle. In exactly the same way, the reworked liberalism of David Korten's
The Great Turning
fills Eden's role with a set of hypothetical prehistoric matriarchies: the Fall with the emergence of the principle of Empire; and so forth, right up to the “Great Turning” toward a liberal ideology that stands in the place of the Second Coming. In these and many other examples of the same type, ideologies presented as radical new visions turn out on closer inspection to be Christian apocalyptic myth with the serial numbers filed off, with new actors in new costumes filling the same old roles.

Now I'm no great fan of mainstream Christianity myself. To me, all its myths and symbols put together don't carry the spiritual impact of one blue heron flying through dawn mists or a single autumn sunset seen through old growth cedars; that's why I follow a Druid path. Still, it seems to me that if people insist on thinking in terms of Christian myth, they might as well go the rest of the way and embrace Christianity as a whole. That way, at least, they would have the benefit of two millennia worth of Christian philosophy and theology, rather than having to make do with hand-me-downs from Marx, say, or the modern pundits mentioned above.

They might also be able to learn a few lessons from Christian history, or any other kind of history for that matter, about the problems that follow when people try to immanentize the eschaton. It's one thing to try to sense the shape of the future in advance, and to make constructive changes in your life to prepare for its rougher possibilities. It's quite another to become convinced that you know where history is headed, and to insist that the kind of society you like best is also the inevitable result of the historical process. When the course you've marked out for history simply projects the trajectory of a too-familiar myth onto the inkblot patterns of the future, immanentizing the eschaton can all too easily become a recipe for self-induced disaster.

History is littered with the wreckage of movements that convinced themselves that the world was about to be transformed into what they wanted it to be. Not uncommonly, such wreckage includes a tumbled heap of human lives. The trajectory of Marxism — from the bright dreams for a better future of 19th century intellectuals to the 20th century nightmares of Stalin's purges, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields of Cambodia — is a route followed all too often by those who believe they know which way history is headed.

Myths of Utopia

Each of the modern ideologies that immanentize the eschaton have recast Christian theology in apparently secular forms, then, but complex transformations shaped the way they manhandled their borrowed myths. In its original form, the Christian narrative of sacred history includes some features close to the myth of progress and others much closer to modern apocalypticism. As sociologist Philip Lamy showed in a useful study,
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though, the old myth has been shattered into fragmentary versions over the last century or two. Many people nowadays, including many Christians, have abandoned the complexity of traditional sacred history for a “fractured” myth that focuses on some small part of the whole.

The contemporary myths of progress and apocalypse are good examples, the former stressing the hope of future bliss, the latter the threat of catastrophe. The myth of progress, in effect, fast-forwards–Christian sacred history to the thousand years that are supposed to come between the Second Coming and the arrival of the New Jerusalem. The redeeming revelation has already happened in the form of the Scientific Revolution, the allegedly primitive past has been stretched and lopped to make it look like a Vale of Tears, and today's scientists fill the role of the Church Expectant waiting for the great god Progress to bring Utopia in its own good time. By contrast, the myth of apocalypse fast-forwards the Christian myth to the last days of the Tribulation, and proclaims that some version of the Second Coming is about to overthrow capitalism, civilization, the Republican Party, or whatever other surrogate fills Satan's role in their mythology.